Making an Exhibition of Myself

by Peter Hall

  We made further morning visits and I performed other songs: Deep Purple and I Dream of San Marino. Then one night there was a special treat. Abandoning our ‘all-found’ agreement at the boarding house, which provided us with a substantial, cooked high tea at the end of each day, we went to the pier for our evening meal. The band was now in tuxedos and couples were dancing. It was an altogether more serious and adult atmosphere. This was style.

  I waited for my moment. Surely the band leader would call on me to perform? The audience, I was certain, would be delighted. The minutes went by and no call came. Eventually my father paid the bill and we left. I was heartbroken. I was a very vain little boy. It was an early and painful lesson on the fickleness of reputation.

  My parents never mentioned then or later that there had been a possibility of me singing that night. But they bought me the ukelele banjo, with George Formby’s signature on the drumskin, as a holiday present. I bore it back to Barnham and played it to the engine drivers.

  My father’s colleagues, the engine drivers, signalmen, firemen and porters, must have been very tolerant. I was without doubt precocious. Yet they were friendly and encouraging. I remember that generation of railway men as a remarkable breed. I see them as Edwardian gentlemen – impeccably turned out, with big moustaches, stiff white collars, and gold chains attached to their pocket watches. The convention was to be hard-working, proud of one’s job, and to be seen to be doing it well. They probably had no more of these virtues than subsequent generations; but even if they were pretending, they convinced. Since the Second World War, the convention has changed. It is now smart to pretend to work as little as possible, and to affect not to care. It is clever to skive. In my father’s day the trains were clean, and extraordinarily punctual. I can still recall his utter dismay when one was a few minutes late. And I can’t remember one ever being cancelled.

  To me, the railways were a world of power, of travel, and of change. I became an avid model railway enthusiast. My imagination was fed by the Meccano Magazine, Hobbies Weekly, and, above all, Uncle Ted’s the Model Engineer, that awesome publication for real men, men with lathes. I made things compulsively. But the gap between my dream and the reality I could achieve was discouraging. I would quickly move on to the next project.

  While we were at Barnham, my father presented me with two second-hand Basset-Lowke model steam engines, one a tanker, one with a tender. They were old, a little battered and very asthmatic, so their power was not to be relied on. But I loved them as they charged round an oval track on the kitchen floor hurling steam and water and methylated spirits in all directions.

  Uncle Hugh noticed my passion. And although he was no handyman, he announced that he was going to make me a model station. On my birthday, he gave me a square-shaped package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a strange-looking box open on one side with a ledge running along the bottom. It didn’t look at all like a railway station, and I was very disappointed. Tactfully, I said nothing; I didn’t want to appear ungrateful. I also had a secret thought: if I made a few changes, it would do very well as a model theatre.

  My mother provided a stage curtain from a piece of green velvet trimmed with orange ribbon. I constructed a complicated system of rubber bands which, when connected to my Meccano clockwork motor, whizzed the curtain up and down at alarming speed. I made sets and painted them. The characters were mostly cut-outs from the Walt Disney magazine. I pasted the figures on thin plywood and then painstakingly fretted them out with my fretsaw. I did not tell Uncle Hugh what I was doing. Later, he attended a performance at my theatre, formerly his station. Tactfully, he said nothing.

  My play-making was fed by films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Errol Flynn in Robin Hood. There was no theatre except for the annual pantomime and the amateur operatics. I went only to the pantomime. When I was ten or eleven, I sneaked through an exit door into Gone With the Wind – it was banned for children. I heard with terror the pain of Melanie’s baby being born. I knew nothing of this because no-one had ever told me. Could this be why my mother often pointedly referred to what she went through when she gave birth to me? I was bewildered. I couldn’t feel responsible.

  There was one miraculous Christmas at Barnham, with thick snow and very low temperatures. When I crept out of bed in the middle of the night to use the chamber pot, its contents were frozen solid. I tobogganed in the fields on a tin tray and the uncles built a huge snowman in the station yard. I had a batch of ducklings which hatched out under a broody hen. I kept them warm with an oil lamp. Everything was secure.

  Then, suddenly, it was all change again. My father was promoted. He was given a job on the ‘Relief’ – which meant he replaced stationmasters who were on holiday, or sick, at a variety of stations over a large area of East Anglia. It was necessary to live in Cambridge – a world away and a huge city. My mother, who had raised great objections to the primitive backwardness of Barnham, now went into floods of tears about leaving it. She didn’t want to leave Suffolk, she didn’t want to go to the city, and she certainly didn’t want to go to Cambridge. Consequently, neither did I. We both cried loudly throughout the whole of one night. But my father was adamant. This was the next step, and he was going to take it. In any case, he thought it would be good to get me away from a country atmosphere. Cambridge might be more of a challenge.

  Though he rarely expressed strong feelings, my father could be suddenly firm. I think this came from his extraordinary common sense and self-containment. He didn’t dramatise; he had great dignity. My mother was always seeing disasters – real and imagined – on the horizon. I’m sure she must have worried him continuously. But he spent a large part of his life successfully refusing to be provoked while my mother did her utmost to provoke him.

  There may have been another reason for our move. The family thought that Barnham would be a dangerous place if there were a war. Near to it, buried in the brecklands, was a large underground storehouse for explosives. Occasionally my father would work long hours because a ‘special’ was coming through. A dark train, bearing bombs, would arrive in the middle of the night and my father would anxiously shepherd it to its objective. In those Barnham years, I heard a great deal about Hitler and a great deal about Mussolini. And I remember Munich. No-one in our family thought there would be peace in our time.

  Chapter Six

  Our new home was on the outskirts of the city of Cambridge, a semi-detached house at twenty-two Blinco Grove. My mother stopped protesting for a while; it appeared that we had come up in the world. The house was painted green and cream and actually had electricity. There was no bathroom, but the loo was, for the first time, part of the house, though still outdoors. For the first time, too, I had a room of my own which was warm enough to work in during the day. I did not notice that the house was built on the cheap, that its garden was puny, its environment dull. When it rained heavily, the bend of Blinco Grove flooded the road to a depth of two feet or more. I always hoped that the water would engulf the front parlour; it was still never used.

  Cambridge itself thoroughly alarmed me. The colleges reminded me of the frightening medieval ruins of the Abbey at Bury St Edmunds. There were other monstrous things: the long single platform of the station; the endless windy loneliness of Hills Road that had to be travelled to reach Blinco Grove. The maze of streets made me nervous too. There were no trees and no fields. I fell into a deep depression which lasted for months. I wanted to be back at Barnham with Charlie Kent. Children weren’t supposed to have depressions in those days; it was considered an indulgence even in an adult. To everyone’s consternation, I frequently burst into tears. There were family councils at Bury St Edmunds at the weekends. We journeyed there on the train, using my father’s privileged rail travel. The aunts and uncles shook their heads and feared that I had always been highly strung. They thought I read too much: it tired the brain, and then the imagination became feverish and took over. I suppose that it would have been easier if I’d had brothers or sisters. At
least there would have been someone to share my problems with. And my mother would certainly have been happier with three or four children to look after. She was a natural mother.

  I have felt suicidal several times. A passion not to go on has overwhelmed me on many key occasions in my life. This was the first time it struck and, because I had fewer inner resources and less to distract me than when I was grown-up, it was perhaps the worst time of all. I was very near the brink.

  I was sent to the Morley Memorial, an elementary school just round the corner from Blinco Grove. I found a good deal of bullying there. The classes were large and the discipline strong. I, an only child of eight and a loner from the wilds of Suffolk, was mocked by brawling boys and giggling girls. Perhaps it was because I had a thick Suffolk burr. I remember how the children listened to me and then burst out laughing. But at the time I wasn’t aware of any accent. My mother was certainly keen that I should speak properly, but nothing was ever done about it. She primly corrected my more outrageous expressions; but though she saved from the housekeeping money to pay for me to learn the piano, the resources mercifully didn’t extend to elocution lessons. The real Suffolk sound has long gone from my voice, my accent settling in to the not-quite-U that I have carried with me since my teens. But I can still hear the original vowels and inflections in my voice, as I can hear them in my fellow Suffolkmen, David Frost and Trevor Nunn. My parents kept their Suffolk voices until the end of their days. I loved their sound. But if I return to Suffolk now, the speech soon depresses me. I think of family gatherings and constraint.

  My depression was acute and today would be considered very dangerous. Cambridge continued to be full of alarming foreign things: flatness; the cold of the Fens; crowded buses; huge recreation grounds with swings and wooden roundabouts that hurt my ankles and knees. I walked through the Mill Road district and noticed poverty for the first time. Deprivation is always more evident in the town than in the country. I survived, as I was always to survive, by frantic activity. I gradually came back from the brink.

  The school was bearable because it was just round the corner from home; if the worst happened, I knew it would only take me two minutes to reach the safety of my mother. Further up the road, I found the delights of the public library. There I could escape into richer and richer fantasy.

  Richmal Crompton’s William enthralled me; I laughed and laughed at his anarchy and independence. I discovered Bulldog Drummond and the adventure culture of the Boy’s Own Paper. I never felt part of Imperial Britain because I belonged to the wrong class and went to the wrong schools. But it was thrilling nonetheless to see how much British pink there was on the map of the world. And I discovered Dickens. His melodrama excited me; he seemed to capture the terror of living. My father gave me a complete edition in tiny print and uncertain binding which he had obtained cheaply by cutting coupons from a daily newspaper – I think it was the News Chronicle.

  My mother said she had read most of the major novels, but I was perfectly sure she hadn’t. I loved her pretensions and the fact that I could see right through them. She was always ready with a fluent speech of appreciation about Fagin or Pip or Mr Micawber. This was her talent: she accumulated knowledge and critical opinions by some kind of osmosis. If a judgement was in the air, she would pick it up. She was one of those people who didn’t need to see the play or read the book or see the film. She already knew what it was like.

  On my ninth birthday, my parents gave me a full-size bicycle. It looked huge. It had wooden blocks on the pedals so that my short legs could cope with its height. I would grow into it, they said. I took to cycling all over Cambridge. Somehow the streets seemed less threatening if I could cross and recross them on my huge black Raleigh steed. This bicycle served me all the way through university as well as school. It was finally stolen from outside my college in my last year.

  The longing for Barnham began to fade. I made the first friends that I can remember. I joined a gang of four or five other boys. We did everything together. Our model was, of course, William and the Outlaws.

  I fell in love too. She was a fragile-looking blonde with blue eyes called Monica. I watched her all day in my class at school. I kissed her during Postman’s Knock at a party. She seemed to find me absurd, and I suppose I was. She giggled at my intensity.

  Chapter Seven

  I was sitting on the back steps shelling peas for my mother on a Sunday morning in September when Chamberlain announced on the radio that we were at war with Germany. It had been long-expected, but it was still a terrible shock. We thought there would be immediate change in our lives, but it didn’t come, at least not at first. Our family unit was more secure than most. My father was in his late thirties and as a railway man was in a reserved occupation, unlikely to be called up. We already had air-raid shelters at school. They were right in the middle of the playground, as if playtime were permanently over. But air-raid practice and gas-mask drill were treats. They were not only a welcome escape from lessons but an opportunity to tickle the girls in the half-gloom.

  At home, when the air raids eventually came, we sheltered under the table. Sometimes we put blankets down and spent the whole night there. It was a monumental Edwardian table, in light oak, that filled our tiny room. My father had bought it for very little at a sale. I believed it was thick enough and strong enough to protect us from any bomb. We heard the German aircraft throbbing overhead on their way to London or to Coventry. Occasionally, an unused bomb would be unleashed on the way back. I saw a Cambridge house with its front sliced off about three streets away from us. All the people had been killed. Their home was exposed indecently, like a tatty doll’s house. I was very frightened. But the war made me feel closer to my parents and more a member of my school. I was now proud to be part of Cambridge; and my depression began to lift.

  I watched the Battle of Britain from our back garden and saw Spitfires chasing Messerschmitts through the clear blue sky while my mother yelled at me to take cover. I was feeding my rabbits: they were part of my war effort. I bred them and took them to market to sell for meat. I built a box trailer on pram-wheels to fasten to the back of my bike, and cycled out into the countryside to pick grass and clover from the roadsides to feed the ravenous horde. At my peak, I owned sixty-nine rabbits. I listened awestruck to the screams of the doe when I introduced a buck into her cage. It was fascinating. Were the screams pain or pleasure? My mother watched too and, with an air of putting somebody right, said, ‘It’s not very pleasant, you know.’ We did not eat my rabbits. The rabbit meat that regularly appeared at our table was the wild variety given as presents to my father as he journeyed round the country stations of East Anglia: ‘A brace of rabbits for the stationmaster …’

  My father took an allotment and I dug for victory with him. I helped him make black-out frames for all our windows – squares of wood battens with black roofing felt stretched over them. I had a map of Europe and little flags with which I tried to keep track of what was happening. I gave up when we were swept out of France.

  The night after Dunkirk, Blinco Grove was filled with grimy, exhausted soldiers, some of them alarmingly bloodstained and bandaged. They sat on their kit bags on the kerb in the evening sunlight. Each house took in one soldier and gave him a bath and a meal. Our soldier was grateful for the tin bath in the kitchen. But he wasn’t very communicative.

  By the autumn of 1940, it seemed as if the war would never end. Or if it did, that we would lose it. I was mightily impressed by Churchill’s radio speeches. He sounded like a leader and gave me hope. I was shocked to find that my father didn’t share my enthusiasm; nor did my grandfather, nor the majority of my uncles. Churchill, they said, was a Tory and his Tory past and treatment of the working man could not be easily forgotten or forgiven. He might be doing a good job now – he had always had the gift of the gab – but he should not be trusted in the future.

  I did better and better at school. I was selected to be one of the pupils who took the scholarship exam. If I did
well, I would go to the Cambridge County Council Secondary Modern School. If I did very well I might win a place at the Perse – an ancient grammar school that had been going since the seventeenth century.

  I sat the exam and was interviewed by the headmaster of the Perse. He was the tallest man I had ever seen. He had a cavernous bass voice and a threatening manner. He was reputedly a monster who shouted at boys with unbridled ferocity before caning them. He smiled at me under his thick black moustache and asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Like every other boy at that time, my head was full of Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters and Heinkels. ‘An aeronautical engineer,’ I replied. Fortunately he didn’t ask me what the job entailed, and he awarded me a scholarship.

  In the autumn of 1941, I began my progress through the school as a Minor Scholar, together with three other boys. We were paid for by the Local Authority. Major Scholars (of whom there were even fewer) were funded by the school itself. We Minor Scholars had dirty, dog-eared books covered with the notes and protests of previous generations. On each flyleaf, stamped in big letters, was the slogan: ‘Minor Scholars’ Book. This book is the property of the Perse School and must be returned on demand.’ I have always loved books, particularly their physical nature – their colour, feel and smell. It infuriated me that such worn-out rags should be given to the scholarship boys. The other boys had shiny new books, bought for them by their (no doubt) well-off parents. I knew I was an outsider, but I didn’t want to be reminded of it every time I opened my books.

  In the Thirties, the Perse boasted a remarkable teacher called Caldwell Cook. He had pioneered a method of teaching English – and particularly Shakespeare – by ‘playing’ it. He wrote a book which, in its day, was the herald of much that was to follow in the Fifties and Sixties. It was called The Play-Way. When I arrived at the school, Caldwell Cook was long dead. But something of his pioneering tradition survived. My earliest memory of Shakespeare is of a group of eleven-year-olds, armed with wooden shields and swords and cloaks, shouting Macbeth at each other. We played on a minute stage which Cook had installed in a basement. It was known as the Mummery; it smelt musty and was falling apart. The experience of acting the play was immediate and exciting. It never occurred to me not to love Shakespeare. He was thrilling and blood-soaked and full of witches. I wanted to know more about him.