Just Me Page 13

  In the morning we would emerge, blinking, to survey the damage. Sometimes we crunched across debris and glass, the smell of cordite twitching our nostrils. Then the search for shrapnel, shell and machine-gun bullet cases and – biggest prize of all – a piece of bomb. No more cigarette cards or stamps for us, this was far more exciting. My father would arrive home and report on his night as a warden. I think he rather enjoyed the fact that he was in charge of his post, giving orders to a doctor and a bank manager. The war was a great leveller. No room for class distinction when you are fighting a common enemy.

  Whenever we could, we still went to school. In a crocodile, protected by one of the mothers, wearing our tin helmets and carrying our gas masks. When we got there we went down the big shelters, where we did lessons. We seemed to be underground most of the time.

  Later, for some reason that I have forgotten, I was evacuated for a second time. On this occasion I went to a distant relative in Crewkerne in Somerset. It was less of a culture shock, as I had already learnt about country ways in Berkshire, and was a much tougher cookie, having survived previous evacuation and the Blitz.

  This time I didn't go to school at all and, by some miracle, was allowed to visit my best friend, Brenda Barry, who had been evacuated to Dorset. Best friends are very important to little girls; they are a source of delight when things are going well, and anguish when they fall out. Which they do a lot. 'You're not my friend any more' is a sentence that chills a young girl's heart. Through these relationships you learn about jealousy, rejection, and the pleasure of shared confidences and aspirations. Brenda and I dreamed of being film stars, and marrying Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor. Brenda was shorter than I, with curly dark hair and laughing eyes. I loved her very much.

  I don't know how I got to Dorset but, having been parted, we were thrilled to see each other again. She was living, along with her two older sisters, near the village of Langton Matravers. Their cottage was called Sea Spray and stood in the middle of nowhere, a tiny, tumbledown, stone house with no electricity or water. It was a beautiful summer, so drawing water from a well and, in the warm night, reading by mellow paraffin lamp, was no hardship. It was bliss.

  We talked and talked, pouring out our sad little souls. We fantasised about the tales of smugglers and searched for the secret tunnel we were convinced went from Sea Spray to the beach. We became the characters in an Enid Blyton adventure. We had a real life escapade when Brenda's sister jammed her finger in an ironing board, and we had to run over fields in the dark to fetch a doctor, there being no road to the house. We went to Corfe Castle and pretended to be artists, sketching the village. But the night that thrilled me most was a visit to Dancing Ledge. The Isle of Purbeck has a rocky coastline and many of the cliffs by the sea have been quarried for the beautiful stone. Dancing Ledge is one such. There is a steep cliff with caves, and sticking out – as the name suggests – is a rocky ledge upon which, when the tide is out, the sea thrashes, throwing up dancing spray. On this ledge is a roughly rectangular deep hole that fills with water, which is left as the tide ebbs, providing a perfect swimming-pool.

  It happened that the tide was out after midnight, so one moonlight night we were allowed to run down the grassy slopes, and clamber down the cliff for a swim. We were alone in the vast shadowy world, apart of course from the smugglers, and their confederates, who were doubtless bouncing about in boats in the roaring sea. We stripped off our clothes and leapt into the black pool, seeming cold at first but actually quite warm from the hot sun that had shone on it all day. We thrashed about, whooping and laughing, exhilarated and fully alive. Then we lay on our backs, floating hand in hand in the velvet water, quite still, staring up at the thousands of stars in the huge sky. The sea crashed against the ledge beside us, and we felt tiny, absorbed into the elements, but made safe by our clasped warm hands. I shuddered with amazement. Shared with my best friend in all the world. A double delight.

  Elated by this happy memory of the war, the phrase 'lighten our darkness' kept going round my head. Then I remembered it was our nightly family prayer: 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.'

  Well, something did defend us, all our family survived the war and I should rejoice. And perhaps revisit those good times instead of dwelling on the sadness. With this intention, on impulse, I booked into a hotel in Dorset and the next day I drove to Langton Matravers, left my car and set off across the fields to search for Sea Spray.

  It took me a long time to recognise it. It has been tarted up to provide a second home for 'someone in the music business'. I got this from a gardener who was tending the immaculate lawns and flowers. No smuggler would venture into this blue-shuttered, tastefully extended house. It is very attractive but not the wonderful primitive place of my memory. Central heating and electricity are de rigueur now, I suppose. The owners have even laid an asphalt road to drive their car to the door. So would I, if truth be told.

  With some regret for progress I set off towards the sea. The scenery was the same as I remembered, but my feelings as I slithered down the steep incline were not. It wasn't helped by being one of those days of relentless drizzle, so the ground was soggy and sticking to my trainers. I remember skipping down as a child, but by the time I arrived at the sea I was red-faced and puffing, a bit concerned that, on the climb back, my romantic journey might end in a heart attack.

  Dancing Ledge was totally different. It is now part of a World Heritage coastal walk. Groups of hearty hikers march along, there is a fence all around the cliffs because nowadays there must be no risk, and steps have been carved to reach the ledge. It is a hell of a drop – when I looked over I was amazed that two nine-year-old kids had managed to get down there. Now, there were climbers with harnesses and people holding ropes at the top lest they fall. How on earth did we manage it? I think there was a rickety iron ladder, but it is still a very long way down and nothing but a rocky ledge below. The danger of that climb in the dark must have made our nerve ends tingle, adding to the sensuousness of the experience. What brave little girls we were.

  No longer so brave, I crept down the steps, which were hairy enough for me. Inevitably, the magic pool was not as I remembered. The water looked black and full of bits. Floating in it now would not be at all the same. There was the usual litter scattered around, and people dismally sheltering from the rain in the dank caves. Needing to get my breath back, I too sat under a rock, eating a KitKat and looked at my guidebook.

  My childhood reverie was shattered when I read that at this place, which brought such joy to the nine-year-old me, ten-year-old boys were used to work in the quarry. An old quarry-man said, 'They wass cheap, plenty of 'em and more where they cum vram', which put me in mind of a shocking documentary made in Palestine – that we looked at whilst researching for the Arab-Israeli Cookbook – about the training of children as suicide bombers; the adults who trained them to kill themselves and others had said something very similar. How ill we treat our children in the world, not just in olden times.

  After clambering back up the hill, I drove around for a while in the pouring rain. Everything I came across conspired to obstruct my search for loveliness. There were notices warning of 'tanks crossing' and I remembered that the military still own a lot of this beautiful area to use for practice manoeuvres. In 1943 the army commandeered a picturesque little village called Tyneham, turning out the inhabitants, supposedly for a short time. The villagers left a touching notice on the church door: 'Please treat the church and houses with care, we have given up our homes, where many of us have lived for generations, to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.' They never have been allowed back and the village is in ruins.

  It was in this area, around Studland Bay in 1944, not long after I was there with Brenda, that Monty, the King and Eisenhower gathered to watch rehearsals for the Normandy landings. A couple of months before – som
e miles along the coast from our beautiful Dancing Ledge – at Slapton Sands the Americans had staged a similar rehearsal that ended in disaster. Through criminal mismanagement the boats were torpedoed by German U-boats, men were trapped below decks or drowned, dragged down by their waterlogged heavy clothes and lifebelts wrongly fastened: 946 soldiers and sailors died. The tragedy was hushed up for fear of damaging morale at a crucial time. Possibly out of guilt, it continued to be kept a secret after the war until, forty years later, a valiant local man, Ken Small, doggedly dug out the lies and subterfuges and erected a memorial made out of a tank he raised from the sea-bed. It wasn't until November 1987 that an official memorial ceremony was held to commemorate those men.

  Here I was, again dwelling on sad events, digging up dark secrets. So much for lightening my darkness. The next morning the rain had stopped so I decided to have another go. I am hugely affected by the weather and this time the sun was shining. As I crossed the fields to Dancing Ledge, I smelled the wild honeysuckle, heard and saw the larks hovering in glorious song, and in the distance was the sparkling sea. This was better. Enid Blyton loved the Isle of Purbeck. In Five Have a Mystery to Solve, Julian says, 'I somehow feel more English for having seen those Dorset fields surrounded by hedges basking in the sun.' I know what he means. Nothing can compare to England on a summer's day. It is a country of infinite variety: dramatic, gentle, rugged, curvaceous, spectacular, bleak, pretty, it constantly surprises and takes my breath away with its beauty.

  Dancing Ledge looked stunning in the sun. Gazing down from the distance of the cliff, this time the pool glistened invitingly. I decided that I was too old to plunge into it. There were too many people watching to go naked, and no best friend to hold my hand. I could admire the view, but too much time had passed to be ecstatic. Tennyson said it all:

  And the stately ships go on

  To their haven under the hill;

  But O for the touch of a vanished hand,

  And the sound of a voice that is still!

  Break, break, break

  At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

  But the tender grace of a day that is dead

  Will never come back to me.

  In 1945 it was all over. First the war in Europe. Then, after the world-changing horror of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war with Japan. But the aftershock waves of the War continued. Service people returned home strangers to their wives and children, as did shattered men from POW camps. But we all rejoiced. Bonfires. The royal family and Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Street parties. Jellies and junket, tinned fruit salad with evaporated milk for cream. A feast in the still-rationed times. But I don't remember the celebrations being as rapturous as one might expect. Perhaps everyone was exhausted and fearful of a future threatened by weapons of unimaginable power. I certainly was. Made old before my time, at the age of eleven I had enough experience of death and destruction to realise the implications. It was a threat that hung over my youth.

  My generation are dying out. Soon there will be no one left who lived through that period. I wonder if Blair and Bush would be so gung ho if they had. A man from the Ministry of Defence was quoted as saying that terrorism in London is as bad as the Blitz, and as big a threat as World War Two. Oh no, it isn't, Sonny Jim.

  Statistics sanitise suffering but those for World War Two are shocking. According to the Imperial War Museum about 55 million adults and children died between 1939 and 1945 and many more later from wounds, mental and physical, inflicted by the conflict. There were 30 million displaced persons, refugees wandering around Europe made homeless by bombs and being sent to the camps; 13 million children were abandoned. Of the 6,000,000 or perhaps more Jews slaughtered, 1,200,000 were children. In Britain 60,595 were killed as a result of the bombing, a miraculously small number, considering the size of the onslaught and if you compare it with 100,000 that died in one night in Dresden. It was a filthy terrible war.

  It left the country bankrupt. A costly loan from the Americans, which we have only just finished paying off, helped us out. As did the spirit of the people. During the war, being neighbourly was a necessary ingredient of survival. The evacuees and the local kids eventually had to accept one another, and learn to tolerate their differences, or life would have been a constant battle. The grown-ups helped each other out in the certain knowledge that some day they in their turn would need assistance. The Blitz spirit was real; 'we can take it' was the bloody-minded stance; and humour, the secret weapon. Because everyone was suffering in one way or another, it was easy to imagine how others felt. Empathy led to sympathy.

  It was, paradoxically, a kinder age. Despite the brutality and hatred that prevailed, such public expressions of spitefulness as Big Brother and the message boards on the web would have been unthinkable. In my working/lower-middle-class world it was not considered admirable to be cynical or rude. I remember my father being mortified when his sister accused him of being 'sarky', short for sarcastic, because of some glib remark he made. We and, I think, most children were taught a rigid sense of duty. He was very angry with me when one of my school reports said I was 'sometimes inconsiderate of others'. During the war we had been expected to 'do our bit'; fourteen-year-old lads were employed as messenger boys, having to deliver dreadful telegrams to grief-stricken families. They would knock on the house either side to get support for the recipients of their dire news. There was compassion even in the young.

  How did the war affect me personally? For the duration, a crucial five years of my childhood, I had no safe home, a lot of fear, no holidays, no toys, not much food, in fact none of the good things that my grandchildren have. My primary education was erratic, and at times, non-existent. I was lucky that, despite a sleepless night of air raids the night before my exam, Miss Markham, got me through my scholarship to grammar school. Here, a band of dedicated teachers channelled my wild, verging on disturbed, behaviour into enthusiastic learning. My father's exhortation at the end of the war, when the crimes of Nazi Germany were fully revealed, that it must never happen again and it was down to my generation to see that it didn't, contributed to my tiresome obsession for righting wrongs – my Messiah complex, as John called it.

  I have a facial tic when nervous, I doodle flags, and I feel guilty if I have a bath deeper than five inches. I find it hard to give myself permission to be happy. I have had periods in my life when the fear that lurks beneath the surface breaks out and immobilises me. My first reaction to any situation is anxiety – fight or flee. I am wary where my children are bold but I am tough and street-wise and I can handle bullies. The dark side of life absorbs and sometimes overwhelms me. All these traits, which I trace back to my wartime childhood, were assuaged by my relationship with John. Despite its ups and downs, he was my rock-like Mr Giles. Now, without him, there has been danger of those demons returning. It is my current battle to see that they don't. I must remember that there were also cowslips, watercress and Dancing Ledge.

  So, how long does a man live, finally?

  And how much does he live while he lives?

  We fret, and ask so many questions –

  Then when it comes to us

  The answer is so simple after all

  A man lives as long as we carry him inside us,

  For as long as we carry the harvest of his dreams,

  For as long as we ourselves live,

  Holding memories in common, a man lives.

  From 'So Many Different Lengths of Time'

  by Brian Patten

  9

  King's Cross · Pimlico · The City · Milan · Guernsey

  HAVING CONSIDERED MY WARTIME childhood and the effect it might have had on my psyche, I was given an unexpected opportunity to delve even deeper into the past. I am constantly asking myself, when I set my sights too high, 'Who do you think you are?' so to appear in a TV programme of that name seemed apposite. The format of the show is investigating the subject's ancestry – but what if I turned out to be descended from Ja
ck the Ripper? As they would be asked to appear on the programme too, I put this possibility to my family. My grandchildren didn't care so long as they could be on the telly. 'They'll try to make you cry,' Jeremy Paxman, a previous subject of the show, warned me but I was fairly sure the only danger would be of my forebears boring everyone to tears. Instinctively I guessed they would turn out to be urban, relentlessly working- to lower-middle-class and dull.

  I didn't have much for Lee McNulty and the rest of the researchers to go on: the only close relatives I knew superficially were my two grandmothers. But nothing of their husbands, not even their names, and certainly no relatives further back than them. In desperation I showed them a striking old photo of a cartoonish lady with huge eyes that I had found in my mother's belongings after her death, and which her best friend Ruby deduced was maybe a relative she had heard talk of with the odd name Madame Zurhorst. Mary Cranitch, the director, said they would see if they could unearth anything in my story that might be of interest to the viewers. Waiting for their verdict I feared my place on the planet was going to prove so insignificant that I would be ignominiously cast aside, my lineage discredited. So I was relieved to hear that they had dug up in my story some previously uncovered areas of social history. There followed two of the most fascinating weeks of my life.

  We started with another trip to my childhood world, the Carpenter's Arms public house in King's Cross, where I spent my earliest years living in the flat above the pub, whilst Dad and Mum and one of my grannies worked in the bars. Despite the gentrification of parts of King's Cross, the pub has the same tatty grandeur as it always had. The old spotted mirrors and antique light-fittings remain; it is still a spit-and-sawdust joint. Walls have been knocked down, so there is no longer a public, saloon, and ladies' bar – but the door marked private is still there, and behind it the stairs on which I used to sit and listen to my mother at the tinny piano, singing duets with my father. Even the cracked lino, which felt cold on my bottom through my pyjamas, is unchanged. One song in particular I still know by heart, which has an odd poignancy now.