The Two of Us Read online

  1 February

  Took delivery of my Jaguar XKR in advance of my birthday. I’ve christened her Mavis to stop her getting above herself. Went for trial run. Does she go. ‘Yes, all right, calm down dear, take it easy,’ But he was beaming. He loves giving presents.

  An Italianate garden may seem a strange choice for a grey suburb of London, but not for Enrico Cameron Hancock. The son of a man who worked for Thomas Cook, he was born and spent his childhood in Milan. It was rumoured that Enrico Caruso was his godfather, feasible if Grandfather booked the star’s travel, but I never met my relative to ask him. Where the Cameron, which I have inherited, came from, heaven only knows. My mother, Ivy Woodward, had worked in a flower shop in Greenwich and a pub in Lewisham before falling madly in love with my handsome dad and remaining so for the rest of her life. She was a beautiful girl and made all her own frocks, coats and hats, which were modish copies from magazines. She was clever with her needle. She made all our clothes too and covers for the furniture and bright curtains to enliven the interior of our box-like house. She washed all the bed linen and clothes by hand, rubbing them clean on a ridged wash-board. I sometimes turned the handle of the mangle to wring them dry and then handed up pegs as she hung the clothes out in the garden on Mondays. It was not done to hang out washing on any other day. The flat irons went on the stove. It was my job to test them with spit. She managed all this on top of working six days a week at the shop. On the few occasions she sat down for a nap with her eyes closed, her hands continued to work away with the knitting needles. Dad laid the fire with faggots of twisted paper and chopped wood for me to light when I got back from school. I cleaned the house from top to bottom on Saturdays, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with pleasure when they came home from work and praised me.

  Even the presence of my two grannies using our front parlour as a shared bedroom didn’t trouble me, although it must have been hell for my mum and dad. The two old girls hated each other. Grandma Hancock was ‘piss elegant’ in her moth-eaten fur tippet and Nanny Louisa ‘Tickle and Squeeze ’er’ Woodward resented her put-on airs. She, after all, had slaved all her life and saved a few quid while Grandma Hancock had swanned around Europe with Cook’s being the hostess with the mostest and not a penny to show for it.

  They had furious rows over their nightly game of whist that ended with a lot of ‘Who do you bloody well think you are?’ and ‘Don’t speak to me like that, woman.’ It wasn’t helped by Grandma Hancock’s descent into dementia so that she couldn’t remember which suit was trumps. I loved her childish behaviour, going to the pictures to see the same film over and over and doing stately dances in the street using a lamp-post as a partner.

  3 February

  John learning his numbers for Peter Pan already. I only have to play a phrase once and he knows it, he’s got such a good ear. He’s enjoying himself. Particularly relishes the phrase ‘Blood will spill, when I kill Peter Pan.’ Have to remind him it’s a show for kiddie-winkies. ‘Well, that’ll shut ’em up,’ he says.

  Our piano had come with us from the pub and family gatherings always ended with a sing-song. Dad often gave us his Ridice Pagliacci, reducing us and himself to tears. Then a rousing chorus of his version of the Riff Chorus from ‘The Desert Song’:

  Ho so we sing as we are riding ho

  Now’s the time you best be hiding low

  It means the Ricks are abroad

  Go before you’ve bitten the sword.

  Mum’s speciality was:

  You must remember this

  A kiss is still a kiss

  A sigh is still a sigh

  The world will always welcome lovers

  As time goes by.

  Her glances towards him were guaranteed to make Dad blush and, of course, cry. He cried at everything, happy or sad. We blamed his Italian childhood. He laughed till he cried and cried till he laughed. He seldom finished a joke, so convulsed would he be with the telling of it. The sight of him spluttering and weeping with laughter, doubled up and groaning weakly, ‘Oh Christ’ had my sister and me rolling on the carpet. We also enjoyed it when he got incoherent with sentiment and yet more tears would cascade into his sodden, overworked cotton handkerchief. Particularly after a few drinks.

  Gradually, I warmed to the security of routine in this new way of life in Bexleyheath. I enjoyed playing in the street with the other kids – no one owned cars then, and I remember no threat of any sort from strange adults or the growing crisis in Europe, and anyway, I knew my parents would protect me from any harm. At five years old, without fear, I walked the two miles to school on my own.

  At Christmas, a big event pushed my fascination with performing a bit further. Upton Road Junior School decided to mount my party piece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It never occurred to me that my teachers would not cast me in the lead. Hadn’t I thrilled the old girls in the Ladies’ Bar with my winsome Snow White? I knew every line of the role. It was a sad six-year-old who broke the news to her family that she had been cast as Dopey. Daddy threatened, as he always did, to write a letter, while Mum went into ‘best of a bad job’ mode and set to work with Billie to make me a costume that would outshine all the others. My red dressing-gown had a little train sewn on, pointy felt slippers were fashioned out of an old mat, and the crowning glory was a cotton-wool beard, fixed with elastic round my head under a green nightcap. I still felt pretty bitter towards the girl with hair as black as ebony and skin as white as snow, who squeaked her way through rehearsals of my coveted role. Just because she’s pretty. It’s not fair. Ah, little girl, it was ever thus. But you will learn that one day her ebony hair will go grey at the roots and her white skin will crinkle and people will say ‘How sad’, whereas, with a bit of luck they’ll say, ‘She’s perky for her age’ about the woman who played Dopey.

  When the great day of the performance dawned, I put on my much-admired costume and set off heigh-hoing up the wooden steps of the platform behind the other six tiny dwarfs. Somehow my train got caught in my legs and my slippers were well named for I slid flat on my face. There was a gasp from the audience which I quite enjoyed because it drowned the sotto voce Snow White’s line. I straightened myself up, twanging my beard, which had settled round my eyebrows, back in its place. What was this? A huge, relieved laugh. This is a good lark, no one’s looking at Snow White, particularly when I contrive another fall and repeat the business with the beard. My lack of subtlety can be traced to this day. Drunk with success, I fell about all over the stage, to the delight of the audience and the fury of my teacher. Not to mention Snow White’s mother. A triumph rescued from the ashes of my humiliation. A lesson learnt. Making people laugh was a good ploy to deflect attention from Snow Whites.

  4 February

  Letter from someone asking me to support a campaign against the closure of Upland Junior School. Because it is an old building and to save money it is being amalgamated with another school. They wouldn’t do that to Eton.

  For some reason, I hope unconnected with this event, I was moved to another school, Upland Junior, and here, under the guidance of an inspirational headmistress, Miss Markham, I developed my performing skills. Participation was the teaching method employed here, probably to grab the interest of the fifty-plus kids in each class. We acted everything, even geography – I was Japan and my best friend, Brenda Barry, was Singapore. In history, being tall, I got pretty good at playing kings and was a dashing Hannibal, thoroughly enjoying trampling over several small Alps. In science, Brenda, as the earth, did a pretty nifty revolve round my sun and our eclipse was a triumph. The only mild anxiety in my life was whether, in the playground, I would be last to be chosen in ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’. ‘Ee, aye, ante oh, we all pat the dog’ could be pretty scary. Even worse, ‘We all gnaw the bone’. They were golden days with only small childhood fears.

  The adults, meantime, must have been terrified. The Nazis had entered the Rhineland and Austria. In 1938 a deal had been struck by Chamberlain to give them the Sudeten
land in return for ‘Peace in our Time’. Chamberlain was a man who, like my parents, had experienced the lunacy of the 1914–18 war, and it is understandable that he tried every trick in the book to appease Hitler. His despairing cry, ‘I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me’, reveals his anguish. I have a photo of him in stiff collar and cravat, watch-chain draped across his waistcoat, with two sceptical sober suited Englishmen behind him. He is shaking hands politely with a bullet-headed, ludicrously uniformed Mussolini, backed by a posturing Daladier and Goering similarly attired for a musical comedy. A gentleman at sea with a group of thugs. Yet the likes of my Dad in those days trusted their leaders to save them. They knew best, the upper crust. They were educated and knew what’s what.

  5 February

  Meeting in the flat at Number 10 to discuss luvvies’ (God how I hate that word) involvement in the election campaign. I found myself having a go at Tony Blair: ‘You surround yourself with men in Armani suits, and the man people elected is submerged in spin. They wanted your honesty, your raw idealism, etc., etc. Why are you running this campaign for the Daily Mail?’ I went on about prisons – ‘Have you ever visited one?’ – and the vilification of asylum seekers. Was appalled by Hague’s speech in Harrogate saying Labour will leave Britain ‘a foreign land’. Shades of Enoch Powell. Why hasn’t he denounced such language? I couldn’t stop. I could hear myself ranting, it was awful. The woman from Coronation Street said, ‘I don’t know why you’re ’ere.’ Then others came to my defence and the whole meeting was soured. Blair was rattled but then so am I. Don’t think he is used to people disagreeing with him. I like him and especially Cherie but when in power people seem to shed their ideals and are only interested in staying there. He pointed out no Labour Government had had a second term so I suppose he has to watch what he says. But it’s sad. Get me. Silly actress telling off the Prime Minister. Mummy would be horrified. My Quaker friends would be pleased though: ‘Speak truth to power.’ Went home and told John, ‘There goes your knighthood, pet.’

  The days of the polite politics of Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Chamberlain were about to collapse in the face of the savagery to come and with them my peripatetic but carefree childhood.

  In February 1939 people in Latham Road began to take delivery of Anderson air-raid shelters, but not my father. Was he still clinging to a belief that sanity would prevail? He knew the SS had ordered the destruction of Jewish properties in November 1938, and some Germans, probably in fear of their lives, had watched while their neighbours were beaten up. Kristallnacht must have convinced most people that this was some evil force that had got out of hand and become very dangerous. Not my dad. A scrupulously honest, loyal and compassionate man, maybe he just didn’t believe it could be true. When Hitler entered Prague in March he did nothing. Only when they invaded Poland and Russia in September did he dig a hole in the garden. Too late to get the corrugated iron panels to complete an Anderson shelter, he managed to acquire some railway sleepers to cover the hole. On 3 September 1939 we gathered round our wireless to hear Chamberlain’s weary admission that in response to his ultimatum that Hitler should retreat from Poland, ‘No such undertaking has been received. Therefore this country is at war with Germany.’

  Immediately after the broadcast the heart-sinking, swooping howl of the siren warned of an air-raid. Panic. My father frantically pushed myself, Billie and Mummy down the garden and ordered us to sit in the wet hole while he single-handedly dragged the final railway sleepers across. He then, in a frenzy, shovelled earth on top. The stones rained in on us in the darkness and for the first time in my life I saw my mother nakedly weeping. ‘Not again. Oh Christ, not again.’

  Mass evacuation started. There was the possibility of us going to America, but when Dad heard that the little Princesses were staying put in London he decided so would my sister and I. My father was put on secret work for Vickers and joined the ARP, whilst my mother continued to work at the shop. Business as usual. Even the local police station had a notice saying ‘Stay good. We’re still open.’ Blackout went up in all the windows and the world went dark. ‘Put that light out,’ shouted my dad in the street. Slogans like ‘Keep it dark. Careless talk costs lives’, ‘Dig for victory’, ‘Be like Dad. Keep Mum’ (excuse me?) and ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ became common currency. The Germans, and later the Japs, became objects of our ridicule. ‘We’ll get the Hun on the run’ and jokes about Hitler’s one ball were rife, even among us kids. Humour was our only weapon against an all-powerful enemy. That and Churchill.

  10 February

  The Tories have taken to standing Hague on a soapbox and letting him loose amongst the people. Only trouble is, in the newspaper photos, the people listening look bemused and bored.

  In contrast to our ribaldry, Winnie’s rhetoric was superb. We all crowded round our wirelesses when he was on. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ I found him much more exciting than Laurence Olivier or James Mason. He was the best actor of the lot, sounding as if he really believed what he said. His gift for oratory got us through that well-nigh hopeless situation. I saw how my parents perked up and set their jaws after he spoke. ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’ The British Empire has not lasted a thousand years, and as the people who experienced the war die off, few recall how fine was the hour, but young as I was, I do.

  When the Battle of Britain started we were situated in Bomb Alley between Woolwich Arsenal, Vickers and the City and docks. We were the defence area. Down our road were black cylinders that produced a smoke screen, on the waste land behind our garden were a mobile searchlight and an ack-ack gun that split your eardrums. Above in the sky were hundreds of barrage balloons into which the more dimwitted Germans were meant to collide, I suppose. Concrete blocks appeared across the roads confidently intended to stop the German tanks.

  My sister, mother and I slept every night on bunks in our now completed 6 feet 6 inches by 4 feet 6 inches Anderson shelter, the bangs and shudders not disturbing my sleep at all. My main fear was that a German airman might be shot down in our garden, but I slept with my hand on the spanner for the escape hatch to deal with that. I still sleep with one hand above my head. Occasionally someone would say after a huge bang, ‘That was close,’ and peer out to see if the house was still standing. We were lucky. It always was – just. The roof went several times and most of the windows; eventually, my father gave up repairing them and just covered things up with tarpaulin and planks of wood.

  Come daylight, we went to school in a crocodile, with tin helmets and gas masks at the ready. On arrival, we went down more shelters. Long corridors, underground, with benches either side. Here we did our lessons, but if the air-raid got very close and noisy it was my chance to shine. Lessons were stopped and as a distraction I was allowed to entertain. I must have been the only person in Bexleyheath who wanted the bombs to fall nearby. I puzzled my young audience with impersonations of Ciceley Courtnidge, Evelyn Laye and Suzette Tarrie – none of whom I, and they, had ever seen, but my sister had been in a panto with the impressionist Florence Desmond and I impersonated her impersonations of them. I had heard little Julie Andrews and Petula Clark on the wireless and I had a go at them, although my Andrews coloratura was a bit of a liberty.

  14 February

  Valentine’s Day. John gave me an odd-looking teddy bear to add to my collection. He says it looks like him – grumpy with little short legs. It does give a familiar anguished bleat when you press its tummy.

  We stuck out this mole-like existence, as usual making the best of a bad job. I competed with my friends for the finest shrapnel collection. Pieces of a bomb were prized, as were machine-gun bullet cases. We were still in imminent threat of invasion. In June 1940 the French surrendered to Hitler in the same railway carriage in Com
piègne where General Foch had made the Germans agree to humiliating terms in the armistice of 1918, so Hitler was just across the Channel, photographed dancing with glee. We were not overly confident that the Home Guard marching down the street with rusty old rifles and pikes and cutlasses from the local museum would be able to beat back the Hun. There were dog fights overhead night and day, bomb sites everywhere and friends being killed. The Spitfires dodged and weaved above our heads, puffing shots at the relentless 1,000 bombers a day that came over Britain. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

  In December 1940 the City of London was ablaze and on 11 May 1941 there was a raid in which 1,400 people died. In one night all the buildings that represented our way of life were struck: The British Museum, Westminster Hall and Abbey, Big Ben, the House of Commons, St Paul’s, all the railway stations and Buckingham Palace. For the first time, people were weeping in the streets. Enough was enough. It was agreed that my sister and I should be evacuated to the country. I had no idea where.

  As I stood in a shattered King’s Cross Station, clutching my suitcase and gas mask, I thought I was being sent away for ever. The station was full of people in uniform. Nearby was a group of Navy officers, showing off to a couple of Wrens in their jaunty tricorn hats.

  ‘Where’s the bloody train?’

  Dad whispering, ‘You see, girls, gents like that can get away with swearing. It sounds all right in a posh voice, but you mustn’t do it.’ He continued to run desperately through a crash course of defensive behaviour: