All that has helped me to understand perhaps just one thing in my research to trace the causes of my isolation: I now realise the point at which I became aware of class distinction, of differences between people which were nothing to do with age or size, aware in fact of the class war, which is not an outdated concept, as those of the upper classes who are not completely dim would con everyone else into believing it is. The class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of human spirit as it has ever been in England: I was born on my side, and I cannot and will not desert: I became an enlisted man consciously but not voluntarily at the age of about seven.
I have studied closely here these two pictures of myself: both are school photographs of the kind for which children are marched out in forms and lined up in fives against a neutral background. The first was taken at the school at Chobham, and shows a bright, chubby, roughly fairhaired boy, his eyes burnished with interest. The other photograph is of barely recognisably the same boy two years later: anxious, narrowed, the eyes now look as though they have seen most disappointments, and expect the rest shortly, the hair is darker, combed, and haircreamed back, parted, the mouth hard, compressed: in all, the face of a human being all too aware now of the worst of the human situation. · · · · · · · This second photograph was taken at a primary school in Brotton, which is a village just outside High Wycombe, in Buckinghamshire, and about thirty miles from London. I do not understand why we left Chobham, but it was certainly after the blitz on London was over and there was thought to be little danger. I can remember approximately the date, too: June or July, summer certainly, of 1941. It occurs to me now that there may have been some emotional or political reason for us leaving the farm: perhaps they could not stand us any longer. This seems fairly likely, as I have not heard my mother since speak with any kindness about our nearly two years’ stay there. I was not in London very long: the only memory I have is of a coalman’s horse and cart outside the Hammersmith house and (some quirk of remembrance) that it showed chalked on a board the price as 3/6d. a cwt., and (I must have learnt this at school) I knew this meant a hundredweight. The stay must have been very short therefore for me to remember nothing else: presumably only long enough for the authorities to arrange to evacuate me officially instead of privately as before. For my area, some division or subdivision of West London, the point to which the children were evacuated was the town of High Wycombe. The early situation is not very clear to me. I stayed with Mrs Davies, a widow of about forty-five who lived in a terraced house backing on to the railway on the western outskirts. My schoolmates—no, the school I was due to go to, had had my name put down for but had not been quite old enough to go to when war broke out, this school was more or less together at the village of Brotton, which is to the south-west of High Wycombe. Thus I belonged to this school, being now old enough, they accepted me as one of theirs, but I knew none of the boys and none of the masters. Some sort of administrative error must have arisen, I feel, yes, in billeting me so far from my school. At one point—it must have been within a few weeks of my arrival—they moved me to a suburban semi of what I now know to have been the worst type, but much nearer to the school: I would not have it. I created a fuss, and within a short while I was allowed to stay with Mrs Davies yet continue to attend the school at Brotton. It must have been an impressive fuss: I remember it involved not letting the other children at this semi read my comics, and Film Fun looms large in this connection. In this move or refusal to move I am now restrospectively certain my instinct was right: that is, I instinctively preferred the life which I could sense went on in these old, even obsolete, dwellings of the railway age, to life in the fletton boxes: or perhaps and more convincingly I just did not want to be unsettled yet again. Anyway, they let me be an exception to whatever rules there were, and I lived in Gordon Road and went every schoolday on the bus a twenty-minute journey across and out of the town to Brotton, to my school at Brotton. · · · · · The evacuated London school as I remember was housed in a tin hut, orginally used I think as a nonconformist meeting place, perhaps Presbyterian, yes, Presbyterian is the word that comes to mind in connection with this building, a corrugated iron shed with a tiny bell tower and bell upon its roof, crowning its ridge. · · · · · Here an old but I recall dedicated man taught us. I remember two occasions, only two. One was him teaching us Beowulf, in translation, of course, or re-told, more likely, the schoolboyishly gory bit about tearing off Grendel’s arm. The other the occasion of my first joke, my first remarked joke, that is. A boy called Hunter came into our shed, an older boy, several classes up, and I told him we did not want him hunting in our class. He clobbered me at playtime. But I had made my first joke. Or at least the first joke I remember making. Poor, jerhaps, but certainly my own, springing naturally and organically from the occasion. · · · · · · · This is all very loose. Is there no other way? · · · · · · · · No other way: the other ways have all been tried. · · No other way. · · · · · · · We were in this tin Presbyterian shed because we overflowed the Brotton village school buildings. My memories of the shed are so few, I must presume, because we were there only such a short time after I belatedly arrived to join the school. Certainly, I know that the school was repatriated, dis-evacuated, whatever the word is, and that it was probably some time late in 1941. There was thought to be no more danger in London, I presume. So much of this is presumption on my part. There are ways of checking these things: but I cannot do so here and it would be too tedious in any case. This does not have to be a documentary. Dates are rarely important. The question that I must now ask may be significant, is likely to be important: why did I not return with my school to London? · · · · · The worst would be that my mother had had enough of me and was glad I was off her hands and did not wish to see me back again so soon after sending me away. It is more likely that she was simply not aware of the position, perhaps thought that. . . . Certainly I would not really impute malice to her. I am quite sure that she thought she was doing the best thing for me in keeping me down at High Wycombe, or in not allowing me to return to London: whichever it was. Perhaps that would be the kindest assumption: that she did not know that I could return, and that I wished to return. What other explanations can there be? · · I must think harder. · · · · · But surely in any case she could not have understood the corollary? That is to say, to reply to an eight-year-old boy asking Why am I parted from my mother and sent away to live with strangers?, that it is for his own good, to protect him from danger: not seeing that this terrifyingly implies that the mother is exposed to that danger from which he is being protected: and that the thought of his mother being killed and him being left was far greater agony of mind than the possibility of injury or death to himself. · · · · · · · · My father was in the Army by this time, and my mother was having to go out to work to keep herself: that might be another reason for it, yes, that she would not be able to give her time (or enough time) to looking after me: though I find it strange that she should imagine any fostermother would care for me as well as she could.
Mrs Davies was a widow of about forty-five. Her husband had either been killed in the First World War or had died at some later date of wounds received in it. They had no children, but Mrs Davies had taken in several boys from Dr Barnardo’s Homes and fostermothered them before the war. Boys, she did not apparently like girls. Two of these were now old enough to have been called up while still with her and were now fighting respectively in the Army and the Navy. She was a dumpy little woman, who smiled often and wore glasses with thick lenses: the smile could be deceptive, as her face tended to retain the shape of it even when she was angry, it was the shape of her mouth, now I come to think of it. She did no job that I knew of: that is to say, she did not go out to work: she must have had a pension of some sort, and I know she received something for fostering evacuees like us as well. S
he had enough to do looking after us, for that matter. I believe she rented the house we all lived in, though I would not be surprised to hear that she owned it. It was one of a terrace of perhaps thirty two-storey houses which backed on to the railway not far from High Wycombe station, and it was comfortable enough: Two down, two up, and a half-width extension from the back with kitchen downstairs and another small bedroom over. Next to the front door, which opened into the front room or parlour directly off the street, was a passageway, alley, or tunnel which led through between every two houses and which provided access to a small yard, the other half-width, and then to a patch of earth available for cultivation or the erection of a small shed, to name only the two most obvious of its potentialities. A fence of obsolete brown sleepers thickly marked off the railway embankment from this patch. From the living room trains could be seen running as though along the top of this fence: from the bedrooms on the upper floor there was no such pleasing illusion, as the track appeared in its true relation. The line carried GWR trains to Paddington, and LNER ones to Marylebone: both companies used saddle-tank locomo-motives, though of different designs, for this local traffic, but there were also namers which often went straight through so fast we could not catch the names. Then there were great American engines which pulled long wagonloads of war material: very alien-looking machines of great power which I later learnt were part of Lend-Lease agreements. At the station some two hundred yards from the house there were convenient walls to sit upon and collect train numbers, and it was easy enough to gain access to the station itself: at least for short periods, until some railwayman chased us off. · · · · · There were several of us during the three and a half years with Mrs Davies, all London kids. I stayed longest, saw others come and go. Alan and Harry were there when I came, George arrived shortly afterwards: he was two years younger, the other three of us were all of an age, more or less. They did not go to Brotton school as I did, but to some other, nearer, one. Not only this set me off from them, but also that I wore a uniform, a school uniform. Even when all that London school had gone back, I still wore my uniform. Alan and the others forced me into a position where I was meant to be somehow better than them just because my school wore a uniform. I did not want to be better than them, but since they forced it upon me I may have accepted it eventually out of pique or anger or something. Perhaps my arrogance dates from this point: it is worth considering: perhaps later. · · · · · We lived nearer the end of Gordon Road away from the station. Just past our house there was a tiny sweet shop and grocer—really a converted house, the front room given over to trade—and from this point the road began to drop and curve away right at the same time. The houses ended, an area of allotments, then the coarse grass of the embankment narrowing and narrowing until it had swung through a right angle, as the road did, too, to pass under two railway bridges (separate lines built by different companies as a result of that maniacal nineteenth-century sense of competition): the road formed a tee-junction with the London Road a hundred yards farther on, by the cricket ground. I remember the walk down that road very well: I can still see the pram shop past the bridge, and some of the objects in the house windows opposite: a lustre-ware vase, a bright metal model aeroplane on a stand. Turning right at London Road there was a pub with a Simonds sign that had tiny arrows sticking out of it: they pleased me, those tiny arrows, and only long after the war did I come to know that they were actually spring clips for neon tubes. I still prefer to think of them as arrows. Past this Simonds pub were a few shops, and across the road from it a small garage with a petrol line on an arm which swung out over the road to deliver. Just beyond this began the interesting part, for me. The river Wye to a child suddenly appeared on his left through a railing, going backwards through a grating into an arch-opening under the shop he had just passed. It moved swiftly and darkly, that river, and god knows where it went from there: farther over was a mill and some sort of engineering works. It only took a moment to adjust to its flow, the river, but it was a weird moment, for a child. Farther on was a footbridge over the Wye into the Rye, a rectangle of meadowland used as a public park, a recreation ground with a children’s playground and paddling pool. The grassed area, perhaps half a mile by a mile, seemed vast to me. It was planted at this time with wood, dead trunks and other vertical pieces, that is, embedded to stick up at regular intervals in the ground like secular totem poles awaiting the carver and decorator: they were there to make the Rye · · CRAANGK! · · Ah, they haul again, recall me again to my state, to this narrow bunk, the ventilation orifice which plays fresh air on to my face, the curtain rail, which is not perhaps brass, merely brassed, I do not know, I can hardly tell, no matter, think, back again: where was I? · · The poles on the Rye, which were there for . . . to prevent enemy aircraft landing, yes, that was it, if any should think of doing so. On the far side of the Rye, running parallel to the Wye on the other side, there was an artificial waterway: not exactly a canal, rather wider, but of the same sort of puddled-clay construction. At diagonally the opposite corner to the footbridge from London Road this waterway drew its water from the grounds of the Abbey, Wycombe Abbey. I now know this to be a posh girls’ school, but then I knew it to be some sort of military establishment into which it was difficult to gain access from Keep Hill, though exciting once one had done so: after the war I was surprised to learn it was RAF Bomber Command Headquarters. I do not know why I should be interested, really. It is of no real interest to me, now, that. So: at this end, whence this waterway issued from the mystery of the Abbey grounds, there was a boathouse, with skiffs, punts and less easily nameable boats, no, canoes as well, for hire. We often used to hire boats, when we had the money. Once near that boathouse I found a two-shilling piece. It was far enough away from anyone or anything for me not to feel guilty about not attempting to hand it in as lost property anywhere. In any case, it made up for one I lost down a drain grating, but that was later, waiting for a bus. But I still remember that as one of the best things that happened to me at High Wycombe, finding that two bob. Lack of money was another pain, a deprivation for my simple needs: perhaps my little need for enough money, my uselessness at handling money, has dated from this moment. Perhaps. But: this waterway, canal, whatever it was: I think it had some special local name, one word, and an article, like The Dug, or The Ditch, or something, I could check, at home, but what’s the point? This canal had many thick green weeds, flowed very slowly, was about four feet deep in the middle, shallowed to two feet at the banks. One bank sloped on the other side down to the Rye: I think now the canal must have been formed by an embankment: obviously: and on the other side were trees, beeches mainly, a small copse between the canal and another boundary of the Abbey. This copse was sole-deep in beechmast most of the year, or part of the year, and once when we were walking there a squirrel fell to the earth some few yards ahead, bounced, and as soon as it touched again was already leaping for the nearest trunk. We were very startled: we would have grabbed it if we could, but it all happened too soon. It ruined the day for us, that we could have caught a squirrel and did not: of course, we could not have done, really, but that just made it worse. There were trees as well on the Rye side of the ornamental waterway, but only for perhaps a third of its length the opposite end to the boathouse. The embankment here was of a different composition, for some reason: it was chalk, and the bottom could be stirred kaolin-white with a stick, and then tiny fish would dart through the clouds for the deeper waters. There were wild ducks on the water, too, which we would throw stones at while little George loudly and loyally protested that they were the King’s birds and that we would get hung if we were caught. I do not remember hitting a bird. Most of the time we were thinking of villainy of some sort or another, often we were actually trying to achieve some piece of villainy, of this petty kind, that sounds too melodramatic, and almost always we were simply incompetent, were frustrated in our attempts. But this canal! · · At the end opposite the boathou
se, a distance perhaps of a mile and one third, the ornamental waterway ended in an ornamental waterfall, a fall of perhaps thirty feet, no more, but mighty and impressive to us. Even now, the word waterfall recalls that place to me, and for years of schooling afterwards an appropriately sized-up version served to make real for me Niagara, Victoria, and other Falls which were otherwise merely names. It was dark, overhung with—not beech trees, and we could clamber up it, only becoming moderately wet, since the water force was that through a pipe of little more than eighteen inches in diameter. This pipe led from the canal above, and was embedded in a concrete walkway across the width at this point, separating the canal from the fall. At the base of the fall there was a deep pool, which, surprisingly, held crayfish—or did I dream this?—we called them crayfish, yes, or crawfish, but that sounds like an American word. I remember them distinctly, lobster-like creatures a rusty brown-red in colour, and I think we caught them by accident at first by pulling dead sunken branches from the water and later intentionally by putting branches in ourselves, to which they clung. This does not sound very likely, but it is a distinct memory, yes, a distinct memory. I think we stoned them to death when we had caught them, or threw them back. Certainly we did not take them back to Mrs Davies’s, for she would not have had them in the place. All this sounds most unlikely: perhaps I dreamt it: perhaps someone else dreamt it. · · · · · God knows where the water went after the crayfish pool—wait, yes, it ran or some of it ran past the foot of Keep Hill, a tiny stream, very clear over a sandy, small-pebbled bed, with very bright green weeds, and I (I remember no one ever with me when I did this) I used to lie at length, bathe my face, drink the water, stare at the subtly-moving stream floor. That place came to my mind, and the waterfall, when I first learnt about geology, years later, after I had left school, the continual eroding action of water: the great rocks (though now I see them as artificially placed and arranged) of the waterfall, and the tiny pebbles and graded sands of the brook two hundred yards away. And the meadow that bridge was in, that came back too in a very different context: once while reading something about witches I placed the performance of a potent female spell (dancing three times naked round a house whilst menstruating during a full moon) in this meadow, though now I can remember no house there, nor what result the spell should achieve. · · · · · · · · At the boathouse end a road backed away through a curve, the curve of the Abbey grounds again, alongside the Wye for fifty yards or so, to a road bridge near the main road by the civic buildings. Over the Abbey wall at this point, fence it was, rather, were greenhouses and some great horse chestnut trees. These latter attracted us several times over the wooden fence and the barbed wire along its top, and once we were caught and shown smartly out by the main gate with an austere warning. Other times we were more successful, harvesting great burdens of milk-crowned conkers. One autumn we heard that conkers helped the War Effort, as rosehips did: the centre for collecting these was down in the High Street near the covered market place, Guildhall, or whatever it was. We found enough ripe red rosehips to half fill a jamjar, and enough conkers to fill an old pram. They gave us threepence for the rosehips and said that did not want the conkers, had, indeed, never wanted conkers. They were even somewhat rude about it, as I remember. In a fit of justified (I feel) disgust with authority we wheeled the pram in the deepest disappointment round the corner to the deserted market, tipped it briefly over on to the cobbles as a very satisfying antisocial gesture, and ran, ran, ran, pulling the pram behind, up through the town and away, not pausing until we were certain we had not been followed. I still feel something of that disappointment: here they were on at everybody to help in the War Effort, and when we did, our efforts were spurned. Now, I feel they might at least have accepted the conkers, told us no more were wanted, and thrown these away themselves when we had gone: but . . . the bastards. · · · · · · · · The playground on the Rye—swings, roundabout, slide, climbing frame—was looked after by an old man, Uncle Tom all the kids called him, a seafaring old josser with a beard and face like the sailor on a Player’s packet, but wearing a peaked cap. Once he retired, but the local paper said the kids made such a fuss he had to be re-employed. I never made a fuss about Uncle Tom, though I was glad to see him back. He used to rub candlewax on the slide to make you go faster. · · · · · · · · Just where the road from the boathouse turned there was some sort of official building—yes, a clinic, I remember now, I went there to have my teeth attended to at least once, more than once. Just in front of this there was some sort of shelter, like a bus shelter, a roof and a skeletal frame. I do not think I ever knew what function it had. At one point I wanted the other boys to perform a play in this shelter, to the public. It sounds now a quite ludicrous and unpractical idea, and I do not think it ever went very far towards fruition. But it was an idea: I can still remember being elated with the romance and excitement of the idea. The play was I think some sort of dramatisation of The Wind in the Willows, incongruously, pathetically, I see now. · · Farther along this side there was a mill behind a brick wall, and the river flowed under this mill, naturally, driving I do not know what machinery. The wall was perhaps four feet high and easy for us to climb: a foot in the cupped hands of Alan or Harry, back against the wall, a lift up for the last man, and we were standing on the top. We first did this to see what the river was doing after it ran behind the clinic and before it appeared at a bridge from London Road farther up: it ran against the wall immediately below where we had climbed up, and slid blackly under the mill. But what interested us more was that the garden of the mill was full of fruit bushes and trees: black and redcurrants, apples, pears at least. But at the point the river left the wall a spear-pointed railing began with a vicious segment bowed spikily out into the garden. I suppose it must have been a July day when we decided we would help ourselves to fruit, for the blackcurrants were ripe. We climbed on to the wall, swung out over the segment which bore our single weights apparently safely but which needed careful negotiation if one’s trousers, to say nothing of one’s privates, were not to be savagely torn. Once round this, it was easy to edge along the railings standing on top of the wall and then drop off on to a wedge of land, cross a narrow wooden bridge over the river, and the fruit was ours. I do not know who saw her first, but I think I must have been the last to see this old woman come running out of the house. Certainly I was last across the bridge and last up on the wall, and I had nearly reached that spiky segment when she grabbed my ankle from below with both hands and prevented me from moving farther. Harry and Alan were over and I saw them running very quickly away towards the clinic, not looking back at all. I felt sickened, wishing it had not happened, trying to shake off the old woman’s hand. Perhaps she was not so old: everyone over thirty seems old to the child, this cliché is true, as so many others are. After a very short while I gave in to her repeated commands to come down. What else was there to do? I was never one for stalemate: I liked things decided, even against me. What would I have done now? I might have threatened to smash her face in with the foot she was not holding, but I doubt very much if I would actually do that even now. Then I was really a coward, or at least had a great distaste for and fear of violence of any sort. What else was there to do? She led me by the arm into a farmhouse-like kitchen, with a flagged floor and an inglenook fireplace, rather bare, that kitchen, now I think of it, where she asked me which school I went to. I would not tell her. She said it must be Scale Lane, which it was not, at that time. I said nothing at all. Then she suddenly snatched a diary from the top pocket of my cheap jacket, triumphantly, and found out all she wanted to know. It was one of those schoolboys’ diaries which contain pages to be filled in with all kinds of personal particulars, amongst which was included my school and indeed the name of my headmaster, I believe. She wrote these down and handed the diary back to me, smirking and saying that my headmaster would be hearing from her in the near future: then led me to the door
opening on to the bridge to London Road whilst still holding my arm in the pinching two-handed grip which she had used to bring me indoors from the garden. I have never filled in personal details in any other diary since, and indeed have always subsequently disliked pocket diaries and have very rarely carried one. · · This was a Saturday afternoon, I am fairly sure, which meant I had most of a weekend worrying about what was going to be done to me when the old cow’s letter reached Mr Cunliffe. If she wrote before Sunday post, then it would arrive Monday morning and I would be for it some time that day. She seemed in the mood to sit down and write that minute. But Monday passed without anything being said, Tuesday too, and Wednesday. The agonies of conscience, guilt, and fear of punishment I had been in for days began to lessen, and I imagined that an almost unimaginable clemency had overtaken the old woman. Then, right at the end of school on Thursday, just as we were standing by our desks ready to be dismissed, the teacher told me to see the headmaster before I went home, and indicated I should do so now, go before the others did. I walked out, embarrassed, ashamed. Now . . . this teacher . . . it was in the top class of that junior school . . . I do not remember her name . . . but that means I must have been ten, if I was in the top class: · · I’ve jumped, this piece is out of order. No matter. · · The headmaster had me sit down opposite him, packed his pipe, and then said, without looking up, So you like fruit, eh? It had come at last. I felt relieved, tonight I would sleep properly, the punishment would be over. Why d’you have to steal it? he went on. I said nothing. If you want fruit, don’t steal it: I’ll give you some: you can come any time you like to my garden and help yourself to fruit, he said, still not looking up. I do not remember answering, or him saying any more. Surely I said something? It seems likely that I cried during this interview, very likely, for I cried easily, at this time. He did not punish me physically: the shame of the way he did punish me, by humiliation, by making me feel a pauper, an underprivileged thief to be understood, remains with me still. · · · · · · · · That same woman teacher who added her own mite to this punishment also inflicted another humiliation on me, about something different, on a separate occasion, that I also remember with pain. I had lost my Bible for one lesson: it had just disappeared from my desk: someone had obviously taken it: so I did the same, took someone else’s, but was caught doing so. She—it seems she was a girl—complained to the teacher, who strode up to my desk, took the book away from me and returned it to the girl and then wrote in capital letters on the board the three words THIEF and LIAR and CHEAT. She turned, looked directly at me, and said Ugly words, aren’t they? And repeated, Ugly words. No more. This time added to my embarrassment, humilation, was also the injustice of it all: I had neither lied nor cheated, and the theft was only a nominal one, as schoolbooks were common property amongst children, not personal possessions like fountain pens or pencil boxes. She had no right: but she had the power, ah, the power! · · · · · · · · Everything else at Brotton school. I might as well finish everything else I can remember at Brotton school. · · · · · · · · This same teacher . . . what else? A play, yes, with pirates or some species of villain, and soldiers, another species. I was chief pirate, perhaps this was typecasting on her part, had my words written out in her square hand on lined paper with just a few previous words as cues, in a different coloured ink: but I was ill for a few days, and when I came back she had given my part to another boy, a boy who I can still see in a white shirt and red sash, with a black patch over one eye, holding a stripped willow stick as a sword. Perhaps this was another way for her to hurt me: to make me play the villain and, when I had accepted this role as at least an identity, a secure place, to deprive me of even that. I was made a soldier, one of a group who came on at the end, a very small part. I do not remember a performance, but I do remember costume rehearsals: fat Burston was too big for any of the soldiers’ uniforms, and I suggested that the teacher’s—Miss Hearne, I’ve just remembered her name, Miss Hearne—I suggested that Miss Hearne’s coat would do for him, which was a short red jacket with no lapels, and unexpectedly she agreed, even seemed to commend me for the suggestion. There is a photograph of the cast of that play somewhere, at home, all of us standing on the school steps. I do not remember what I look like, but perhaps that is where I have the image from of the boy with the willow sword. · · · · · Miss Hearne’s was the top class. I was a milk monitor . . . yes . . . fractions: I missed an important lesson on fractions one morning by being milk monitor, by taking an inordinately long while to carry round the crates to each classroom, on purpose, with another boy, and it was years before I caught up on fractions, yes, years, though I was so relieved not to have to learn them that morning, so relieved, but is that significant? A significant gratuity, yes, one of the points at which things are decided, in which life is directed, yes: for I did not lack brains, I did not lack the capacity to learn: but at this point this capacity was directed away from maths and towards nothing else in particular, went inwards upon itself, I suppose. I believe, all aptitude aside, I could have been made interested in maths, in the scientific side: was ready material to be formed in one shape or another by a sufficiently good teacher: my brain could have been made to apply itself to anything. It was generally applied to nothing: except perhaps itself, whatever that may mean. · · · · · · · · I first knew love in Miss Hearne’s class, I think. Love, that is, as distinct from the peering at genitals with Dulcie, and Sarah, were their names? This girl I do not remember the name of, I am not good at names, so. It started with looks, as these things do, loving looks across the classroom, looks which encouraged me to believe she felt the same, or similar, love, a kind of love, a kind of burning inside the mind which left no room to think about anything else. It must have been St George’s Day, Empire Day, that is, 1942 or 1943, I suppose, more likely the latter, for we were in class listening to a radio programme from round the world, and even now I associate Waltzing Matilda with that girl’s face, pretty in a sharp, small way, and that love I felt between us. I took it that one stage further, fatally: I wrote a note declaring this love and gave it to her at playtime. This destroyed the love, I was surprised and disappointed and pained to find: for I saw her giggling with her friends over the note, and later they were all giggling at me. Then the other boys knew from the other girls. This was a betrayal of my fine, intense emotion, and it ceased as a result. I did not worry about its loss so much as the embarrassment of having to stay in the same class with her: an embarrassment that has been repeated so many times since, oh so many times since, in classrooms and offices, rooms of all kinds and various forms of transport and, oh, so many times! · · · · · · · · Burston, fat Burston I had a fight with in the playground, over I remember not what. All that lunch hour we circled each other round the playground, neither landing a blow that hurt, both afraid not so much of the other as of violence, as of pain, as of blood and crying. Eventually after a long while I pretended to be hurt by a low blow of Burston’s, broke into something convincingly like tears, and went round complaining that I had been beaten by a foul blow. At least it ended it, the fight, at least both of us could claim not to have lost, even both to have won, clever resolution, I feel now. I was never one for stalemate, again: I liked things decided: either way. Would force a decision against myself if necessary: how often have I done this with girls, with love relationships? Far too often. · · · · · In the playground another lunch hour a boy cut his arm, the fleshy part midway between his elbow and his shoulder, on the pointed railings between the school and the road. It was a pyramidal sort of wound, as deep as the two cuts were long, with much blood. I did not actually see him do it, but I was near enough to realise what had happened. I volunteered when Mr Cunliffe asked for eyewitnesses and told him that the boy had been climbing the railings and had fallen backwards, cutting himself before he had had time to hold with his other hand. It seemed o
bvious that this was what had happened, though I had not actually seen it: perhaps I did deserve to be called a LIAR. · · · · · The playground had a great shed for us to use when it was wet, and along one of the shorter sides of this there were lined half a dozen or so galvanised water-tanks with wooden lids. These contained the emergency water supply for either us, or the village, or both, in case the mains were damaged by bombing. They were green and slimy inside, and I consciously feared the occasion upon which I would need to have to drink from them. I was one of the monitors who drained these tanks every Friday afternoon and refilled them from a tap in the main building through a long black hose. I was given several menial jobs like this, I see now: having been a teacher, I recognise this as being either because it was thought absence from learning would do me harm less than anyone else in the class, or being done out of spite, out of a desire not to be put to the necessity of even looking at my face. This was Miss Hearne’s class again, the top of the juniors. One other thing about her comes to mind. We read, that is two boys I knew, read in the local paper that the mayor or someone like that had visited the central kitchens where our school dinners were cooked, had plunged his hand into a sackful of school greens and had found them mushy, yes, mushy was the word, I think that was probably the time mushy first entered my vocabulary. One of the boys on my table put a cutting of this incident next to his plate as we sat eating school greens, and Miss Hearne came up and screwed up the cutting and said she wanted to see every scrap of everything cleaned up off every plate, particularly the greens. We cleared up everything, but it was brave of the boy who did it. Miss Hearne was a right all-round cow, now I come to consider it. But it was wartime: perhaps she had some justification for her impatience with us. But the meals were very poor, I do remember. · · · · · The main school buildings were an island in a sea of playground. On the side nearest the road there was a flagpole, up against which we used to play cricket with a tennis ball and an old bat with a very springy handle, all falling to bits. I can still remember the sensation of making a hit with that bat: no bat was ever the same, afterwards, they were all too stiff, had too little latent power, power of their own. I remember the construction of the flagpole: two side pieces with a bolt through the top and through the pole itself in the middle of them: I realised they must have bolted this one horizontally and then swung the top up and the end down and bolted it there. Perhaps it was through observing these things that I was poor at cricket, could not concentrate. I was usually out to the first straight ball, after I had won my innings either by a catch or, very much more rarely, had bowled someone by my all too orthodox action. I could never make a ball spin: perhaps no one could make a tennis ball break on asphalt: could ask Zulf, he would know: when I return. However. We also played football with a tennis ball in that playground, at the other end. I was better at football, though not by any means outstanding, and not as good at that time as I later became. · · Right at the top end were shelters, air raid shelters. I remember being in these only once, as part of a drill. They were dark, cold, dank, and again I hoped, as with the emergency water, that I would never be called upon to use them in earnest. Nearby was a children’s drinking fountain at which, once, having splashed my face with water to cool myself after a hot playtime running about, a girl asked me, astonished, if it was all sweat on my face, and I, lying, said Yes. For some reason I cannot at all explain, this memory is closely associated with a chromium Bosch cycle dynamo. · · · · · Beyond the shelters a path led up to a patch of ground with elders beside the path. This land, perhaps it was an allotment, belonged to the headmaster and was cultivated, though the word suggests something far too sophisticated, by the children as their gardening lesson. We grew cabbages, sprouts, lettuces, parsnips and other vegetables for that man. Pressed labour we were, and never tasted a green leaf for our trouble. Nor do I remember learning anything either: I hated gardening. It was not as though we were providing our own mushy greens, either. · · Not always . . . we did not always have dinner at that school, for we sometimes went to a secondary school, a big-boys’ school, not far away, for school dinners there. They were no better, I feel, for probably that was where the primary ones were cooked before being transported half a mile up the road. But there was more to do afterwards there, on a great grassy open space with the occasional tree and a swimming pool at one end. Not that I went swimming much there. Once, I think, when a man taught us rather badly to try to swim: I did not learn from him. That was another thing about the war that caused us to miss things: in peacetime there would almost certainly have been someone around with interest and special knowledge to have taught a difficult case like me to swim. The same is true of all the other teachers who were not there, who were at war. At least the probability of there being someone there would have been greater. Perhaps I delude myself: perhaps I am what I would always have been. · · The big boys at this secondary school would make expeditions a mile away to see one train pass at a roadbridge, the lunchtime express or something, in order to collect its name and number: their dedication impressed me: so did the standard of football they played. · · Returning to our own school we passed a baker who sold good cream buns, which or course could not have been made with cream but which were still delicious. That baker’s is weirdly associated with Wimbledon railway station in my mind, and with an announcement in the papers at the time that rye was going to be used in bread. That does not seem very logical, to say the least. No mind is logical, logic is not a quality of mind. At a sweetshop and stationers someone started a craze for buying flat boxes of six (was it?) Anadin tablets, dissolving them in water in a small bottle of aspirin size, and drinking the pink liquid as though it were lemonade or some other children’s beverage. No one came to harm of this craze, that I knew of: it seems very fortunate and most unlikely. Next to the secondary school there was a hut, a workmen’s café, an eating place where more than once—or was it only once?—I queued up at the side door, from which warm smells from the paraffin cookers blew, and bought a Slice. This was a piece of white bread about an inch and a half thick, thickly in proportion covered with margarine. This was after school: I was hungry: it seemed natural to go there for something to eat: I was hungry! I had the penny it cost, the Slice, to spare: I enjoyed it, I remember enjoying it. Next morning in Assembly the headmaster, without mentioning my name, remarked adversely on a certain child from his school who had shown it up by being hungry and satisfying this hunger at such a common eating place. It was some time before I realised he was talking about me. It was humiliating to realise it. Another humiliation. I felt they all knew it was me. They probably did. These things get around. I was only hungry. I see no shame now, despise them for taking their bourgeois offence. The class war again. They made me their enemy. I am satisfied that they did. They will have cause to remember me: have had. · · · · · My clothes, too, were a source of shame, or, rather, of anxiety about shame, I felt anxious lest my clothes should bring me to feel shame, that others were looking down on me because of my clothes: I was an awkward boy, heavy, I grew quickly, my clothes were never expensive ones, often of the cheapest kind, I led them a rough life. I have never had enough clothes to change often, to give clothes the rest they are curiously said to need from time to time. I wore everything to destruction, to rags for the totter, quickly. My mother had little money, my father had only the pay of an RAOC private: clothes were rationed, on clothing coupons. I remember my parents buying me two jackets once, for thirteen coupons: they saw this as a bargain, one jacket was normally thirteen coupons and these were only six and a half each, half the usual. This was because they were made of sackcloth, that they were six-and-a-half, grey, the texture was loose, like that of sacks I had seen at Chobham. Even when they were new they looked shoddy. More than one kid commented on the slackness of the weave, embarrassingly, the coarseness of my sackcloth coat. One I wore to school, one I kept for best, ha! My shoes were always wearing out,
I was heavy on shoes, I went through them, through them. The toecaps would be disfigured by a transverse dent in them about a quarter of an inch from the end, then the ridge thus formed would get scuffed white, or leather colour, and a hole would form. Though before then holes would have been worn like a contour map through the soles. My body caused these things: it was painful. · · · · · · · I was always short of money: obviously. But it was not exactly money I recollect being without: it was being without so many of the things bought with money: tritely. I had pocketmoney from my mother, half a crown a week, or even five shillings it went up to, perhaps, I do not remember, so it could not have been important to me, money, as such, as itself. It was all the other things I lacked, I felt I had missed, felt I deserved, perhaps. Once in that school hall at Brotton I was one of those in charge of a raffle at some sort of Open Day, Fête, and I put a half-crown from the receipts into my right trouser pocket. I was sure no one had seen me: there was a great press of people round me: everyone felt excited: there was no way I knew that the money could be checked: yet nevertheless after about half an hour I put the money back. It was pure fear of being found out, not any moral decision, or one prompted by conscience. · · That hall is associated with another memory: one minute’s silence for the first world war dead on an Armistice Day anniversary: we were told to think of the dead, and I thought of soldiers being killed: that is, I thought viciously of the killing, not the dead, no, that was what they wanted me to believe, to think, but I would not, no. · · · · · Stern and another boy called Mervyn come to mind as the only names apart from Burston I remember there. · · Once more—last—the hall. The headmaster on my last day there saying farewell at Assembly to his top class, wishing them well at the local secondary: all except me, he explained, whom he had promised to allow to go to Scale Lane. We had all taken the eleven plus, though I do not think they called it that then, and Eric and I had taken a special exam, different from the others. I realise now it must have been a London eleven plus, not the Bucks one, for Eric, who was another name I remember now, and was a leftover, the only one apart from me, from the London evacuation, Eric took it at the same time as I did, and passed, or was chosen, or whatever. I did not, was not. I can remember sitting the papers in the headmaster’s study, room, the two of us, three rather. Afterwards Mr Cunliffe looked over my paper, kept me back, said Couldn’t you do even that one? He seemed surprised as I shook my head. · · · · · · · · Is that all about Brotton school? That is all about Brotton school. I can remember no more. It bores me, anyway, Brotton school, now. I am glad to be done with it. · · · · · · · · Scale Lane was much nearer to where I lived with Mrs Davies than the Brotton school was and I think I must have asked to be sent there, in view of what I remember the headmaster saying that last day. But I should try to keep things in order, chronological order, so what things happened outside school before I went to Scale Lane? · · · · · I tried to run a Stamp Club in the front room at Mrs Davies’s. There was this book, I think it was called the XLCR Stamp Finder, a green pamphlet rather than a book, yes, which told you how to organise and run a Stamp Club. I held a Stamp Treasure Hunt, concealing stamps about Mrs Davies’s formal front room, under the legs of chairs, between the keys of the piano, suchlike places. It was not a success: the others found them too easily. And I had to supply the stamps. Though it pleased me that Alan found an eightpenny British that he needed for a set. I forget the other games we played at the suggestion of the XLCR Stamp Finder, but there were others, I assume, my organising did not end there. But there was only one meeting of the Gordon Road Stamp Club. · · · · · The lavatory at Mrs Davies’s was outside, out of the back door, down the yard a few paces, through the coal storage, past the wooden-rollered mangle, and sharp left. There was a pool of water once in there, and I showed it to Jim, who was home on leave from the Navy at the time, and he said it was someone who could not aim straight. But I felt guilty about it, and not about my aim, either: I suspected I had slammed down the seat too hard and broken the pan: it leaked badly round the rim when it was flushed, which was how the floor became wet. I denied direct knowledge of it, truthfully, as I did not consciously do it, break it, and Mrs Davies fairly reasonably and without recrimination paid over a pound for a new pan. But for several days I was worried, very anxious: it seemed a very big thing at the time: rather ludicrously, it represents for me when I think about it now something like the very type of my anxieties. · · Jim I think was briefly home when I arrived at High Wycombe, though he went into the Navy soon afterwards. He was small and fair, one of the Barnardo’s boys, serious and not very approachable by us evacuees. He worked in the furniture trade: High Wycombe is more concerned in the woodworking industry than in any other. It was Jim who made us our sledges, from beechwood chair parts: more or less the back of a chair, the curved side-pieces forming the runners, with stretchers in between. These runners were rubbed with candlewax and the sledge could then be used on grassy slopes in dry weather. They were enjoyable enough to use, but a burden to carry up to Keep Hill where there were some fair slopes. To reach Keep Hill we went across the Rye, past the waterfall and up a short track which ended by a chalkpit. At least, we always called it a chalkpit, though perhaps it had not been dug, was merely a natural escarpment. You could go another way, along London Road and down a lane with a closed Walls Ice Cream Depot on the corner and a cottage with a large ANTIQUES sign outside (which I would always mispronounce to myself) on a crook in the lane, which led to the track up to the chalkpit. The sledges had a rope on them by which to attempt to steer, but they were extremely inefficient in this respect. The slopes were from the side of the track, perhaps a fall of six feet in fifteen yards. I always associate the song Old MacDonald had a Farm with those slopes: why? The chalkpit was far too steep, sheer at the top, for us to use sledges down it. But we enjoyed climbing it, and once we ran down it: this was exhilarating: I fell over perhaps a third of the way down, rolling head over arse anyhow and breaking a small mirror in my top pocket. I grimly accepted it meant seven years’ bad luck and whenever I had bad luck in that period and even afterwards I thought of my breaking that mirror. My father gave me a steel mirror some time later, either chromium or stainless steel, which I could not break, an Army one. Why did I need a mirror? · · The chalkpit it seems to me had tiny blue flowers growing on it at a certain time of the year: but perhaps this was not so, perhaps it was a blue butterfly, the chalk blue or something, I could check, at home, I can check practically nothing, now, ah. · · · · · Blue flowers or blue butterflies, then, a most delicate shade of CRAANGK! · · They haul again, yet again, interrupt my thinking, no, I must not allow myself to be recalled, who am recalling, when recalling. · · · · · I remember the grassed cap of the chalkpit very well: the trees there to climb: I feel sure if I went back there now, over, yes, twenty years later, that I should be able to climb those trees, I should recall exactly how, that is: they would have grown, but so have I, more so, in proportion, I would be able to stretch easily for holds which were very difficult before. And there we went nesting, finding few, and other boys telling us they had fried blackies’ and thrushes’ eggs in a cocoa tin lid over a wood fire, they were just a mouthful, they said: I was repelled by the thought, they might have been addled, or had partly grown young birds in them. It did not seem cruel to me, nesting, I did not think of it as in any way cruel, no. That was a place so thick with years of beechmast that it came over the side of my shoe, into my shoes, uncomfortably, where I remember them telling us that, though we were up trees, our trees, at the time, yes, Alan and Harry and I each had a tree, and George always stayed at the bottom, sometimes crying, sometimes telling what were obviously lies about what he used to do when he was with his father, to make up for not being up the trees: he could not climb, was too afraid to climb, being young. · · Once a Yank drove a jeep up the easier
slope beside the chalkpit, at right angles to the precipitous part, paused, and we wondered whether he was going to try to drive down the scarp: we knew these jeeps were supposed to go anywhere. But he did not go over: he saw us looking, from our trees, it was in the evening, and he reversed in an arc and shot off down the milder slope on to the track, and down towards the road. There were lots of Yanks about in High Wycombe, particularly in the last years of the war, in uniforms of smoother cloth than the English forces, and with gaudy insignia on their shoulders: I suppose they were something to do with the Abbey, the base, and so on. If it was not there they were all billeted, in the Abbey grounds, then I do not know where they lived in High Wycombe. In the town we kids would ask them for chewing gum, Got any gum, chum, was our rhyming mendicant catchphrase. Perhaps once in fifty times of asking were we given chewing gum, in flat packets, delicately flavoured, so much more interesting than the English kind, which came in a different shape, with a white sugar coating. We knew they used to go out with English girls, and we knew that there was often trouble with English men because of this. Once a Yank quarrelled with his girl across the street from me, in London Road, near the Rye entrance by the garage: a fairly tubby little man, and she turned and left him standing there, and he shouted after her, Now look what you’ve done, You’ve broken my heart! The woman just went on walking away. And I was sorry for him, but I asked myself why he did not follow her, and could not answer. · · We could get into the Yank camp, into the Abbey, from the top of Keep Hill. It was a difficult climb over barbed wire on a high railing, but we would use branches, both dead and on nearby, almost overhanging, trees, to help ourselves. Once inside it was good: what I now know to be a plantation of young spruce: then we just thought of them as Xmas trees. At least once we took food in there and made ourselves a camp and lit a fire. But they made it very difficult for us to climb in after a while, and at one point there was even a guard patrolling the top of the grounds, along the netting where the Abbey grounds were adjacent to Keep Hill. On the legal side of this fence we more than once found used sanitary towels and sheaths hung up on shrubs, decorating the spiked hawthorn bushes. We called them jam-rags and spunkbags, and I do not think we were very clear as to what they were used for: but we knew they were connected with sex, and we believed they were the work of Yanks. I do not think love touched us at this time: I am not sure. But there was a scheme we certainly talked about a lot: capturing girls and tying them up in order to do what we liked with them: though what it was we would have liked to do is very difficult to recall accurately. Certainly to look at them, yes, to investigate their genitals, to make those parts less private. One day we even took some string up to Keep Hill with us, but we were not able to bring ourselves to seize any girls even though we saw some about our age who looked to be just what we had in mind. At the last, it was simply far too embarrassing: hardly less so now. · · · · · What other places? · · · · · · · · The caves at West Wycombe, and the church with the ball on top. We made expeditions out of going there, usually on a Sunday, and climbed the stairs to the tower parapet. A quadrilateral roof, its lead gouged, scrawled, initialled, supported the ball itself, which was much larger than it had seemed from below. A vertiginous set of steps with chains for handholds led into the ball. A terrifying climb: I remember making it only twice. Inside the brass-sheeted ball were four portholes, ah, through which the view was of course scarcely better than from the parapet. Wooden construction. Room for perhaps twelve disciples on benches around, a table in the middle—or was there a table? It was built in the eighteenth century, for a Dashwood, Earl or somesuch title, and was alleged to have been the scene of orgies. At least, they played cards up there in the ball. The caves under the hill were hollowed out of the chalk to provide metal for the road that runs a straight collimation into High Wycombe. All this I think I knew at the time, all this useless history, but I may have picked it up later. A prominent sight on the road to Oxford, as the motoring handbooks say. Yes. There was and probably is a fake mausoleum up there, too, built by the same lot, rather half-heartedly, nearly derelict then, the stucco fallen in places to show the cheap brickwork underneath. The caves I remember enjoying, going in with a lighted candle bought from a man at the entrance: slimy dirty chalk walls, treacherous stepping, a chamber or hall at the end with cribs off it in which the members of the Hellfire Club, dressed as monks, were supposed to have taken their women, dressed as nuns, for purposes which even to my inexperienced eyes there seemed to be insufficient room. Did I know these things at the time? Or later? For I went back several times, yes several times, after the war. · · This is tedious, has no relevance. · · We boys used to race, scramble up that hill, up the sharp scarp side, through rough grass and tripping in places where the chalk had broken away vertically, to the top, panting like old men. . . . · · Yet it is compulsive: the memory has no stop, is only partly under control, bubbles on, once switched on · · Booker was another place: at Booker there was an aerodrome from which Tiger Moths drawled over Brotton school many times a day, many times. They were yellow, the Tiger Moths, trainers, and we kids were always rather contemptuous of them, who had seen Spitfires and Blenheims, Hurricanes and Beaufighters. But Booker I remember better because of walking once near there to a football match, in my football boots, for miles past the ground, because I had misunderstood the directions to the ground: miles it seemed I walked into open country until an elderly man put me right, a kindly man as I remember: I arrived just at half time, played the second half at centre-forward, badly, I could not play very well then, I must have been eleven or so, I was better later, by the time I was eighteen I was playing for the ATC team which won the Spitfire Trophy against the whole of England’s ATC. But that walk at Booker I remember bitterly: I was crying at least part of the way, from frustration, towards the end, before the kindly man, as I remember. · · I was mad about aeroplanes at this time, indeed at earlier times, there had not been a time when I could remember aeroplanes not engaging some considerable part of my attention. Any flying films that were on I would try very hard to see, though they were grownups’ evening rather than children’s Saturday morning pictures. Somehow we—for Alan or Harry would come too—would try to dodge Mrs Davies’s uncanny system of knowing where we were without actually being with us, and go to the pictures: though we might have to leave early, before the film had perhaps finished. One such flying film I saw was Target for Tonight, guiltily lying to Mrs Davies afterwards, hurrying to bed quickly from the bad temper she fell into, she knowing we were lying but not what about. A man in a flying helmet is all I remember from that film, no face, just a head in a leather flying helmet. Perhaps there were American aircrew in that audience that night who would die in the air the next— · · ah, that is fanciful, smacks of fictional speculation. · · Another film I did not see was The Phantom of the Opera, which was forbidden to children, as a result of which I have always since wanted to see it, knowing nothing of it but its title: but somehow never have. Both were on at the Odeon, but did they have Odeons then? The name? An Odeon-type cinema, anyway: there were only three, and the other two were the Rex and the Palace. We did not often go to the Palace, and even less often to the Rex. Our Saturday morning pictures were at the Odeon-type, cowboys and thriller serials and soppy kids’ stuff and one I remember for its enthusiastic signature-tune Anchors Aweigh, American that must have been, and stuff which must have been patriotic and English and sometimes boring. When it was boring the kids talked and mucked about and you would see a constant bobble of heads across the screen as kids went to and from the bogs, while when it was good no one made a sound or moved. I saw the Belsen newsreels at the Palace, why I do not know, that must have been at the end of the war, even just immediately after the war: I remember the warnings outside the Palace about the nature of the newsreels, the insistence that They believed they must be shown. I do not remember what I thought of them. I do know what I am suppo
sed to have thought of them. I was only twelve: at twelve I did not have much judgement of these things. The Palace I also remember for the time Mrs Davies took me there, not for her taking me, but that she gave me half a Mars bar out of her own sweet ration, the kindest action of hers I recall, as such, though now I am adult I see that she must have been one of the kindest of women to have taken in evacuees at all, for next to nothing. Though she must have felt a need out of her own lack of children: but having found a motive, a reason, so what? · · She used to drum her fingers rhythmically, Mrs Davies could beat drumrolls and so on, did this even in the pictures. She taught me a little how to do it, starting very slowly, moving my large fingers: I preferred in the pictures to feel the velvet pile of the seat standing firmly against my finger pads. · · · · · Near the Odeon-type was a Temperance billiard hall where—why I can’t think—they let kids like us wander in and watch the play, and once at least I bought there a dry cheese sandwich and I seem to remember buying food with much of my pocketmoney at this time, whenever that time was, any time between 1943 and 1945. Compensating—though, again, what use are bloody reasons? · · And near that the grocers where we bought pearl barley for our peashooters, to be arraigned by teachers for our wastefulness, our filthiness, our lack of patriotism: but there was never a sweeter peashooter ammunition than pearl barley. It was not as though it tasted good as food, anyway. · · · · · · · · All, all? · · All? No, but go on now to Scale Lane, enough of the earlier past, this works in chronological order as far as it can, if it works. I begin to suspect I shall wish I had never started on this examination: I keep surprising myself with my own nastiness, with my own limitations. · · But on. · · · · · · · · Instead of the bus ride to Brotton, first of all, there was a walk to this new school, a secondary school, Scale Lane, fairly new buildings, on a hill over High Wycombe to the east, north-east-by-east, perhaps: a long walk, certainly, but an interesting one, one I really enjoyed, for the period I did it. I went down the hill from Gordon Road, across the triangular patch where three roads became one, past the barber’s, and up an asphalt path with an iron handrail, very steep, glad to haul myself up by the handrail, at times, at some points, though often I would take a run at it and reach the top without needing to hold. At the top of the path, past a few houses, there were open fields and hedges, and the roof of the school could just be seen over the arc of the hill. To reach it I turned left along a hedge—hawthorn, I remember, may in spring, later, with red berries we called bread-and-cheeses though they never tasted remotely so to me, and elders, shrubs like that: which merged into a copse, or spinney, I never know the difference, of tall spindly trees, stubby bushes, undergrowth, perhaps two hundred yards long, perhaps fifteen yards wide. I remember coming across the words copse and spinney and realising with delight that the wood on my way to school was one of these: which one, it never bothered me, I liked both words, I liked the wood too. Wandering through that copse I could imagine myself into all kinds of situations, set all kinds of weird fantasies and imaginings there. · · After this copse or spinney, I would turn right up another path, of yellowish clay, up the hill beside fields to the edge of the school grounds, to a side entrance. · · This was the short way to school: there was a longer way, along roads, up Totteridge—was it?—Hill, which I used when the weather was bad. It had to be really bad, however. The only time I remember going that way was when several inches of snow had fallen, and I was snowballing up Totteridge Hill with other kids on the way: and suddenly I felt ill, faint, my heart drumming, and I had to sit down on the pavement against a sapling in a wire guard: or I would have fallen, have fainted. Many kids passed and took no notice, in the way boys do, through embarrassment, or self-interest, or whatever: but one boy, perhaps he was a prefect, enquired into my sitting in the snow, helped me up, accompanied me to school. I forget whether I was sent home or not on that occasion, as a result of that illness, shortcoming, whatever it may be called. But on another occasion I was sent home after fainting: I felt the same feeling come over me whilst standing in the hall waiting for Assembly to begin, and I turned to tell our teacher, who stood at the side against the wall. Before I reached him, I blacked out. The other told me afterwards that Mr Proffitt caught me before I fell. I was in the staffroom when I recovered and went home an hour or so later. Mrs Davies was I suppose surprised to see me. I felt well again very quickly, and went down the town to buy some fireworks. That dates this second time of fainting, for the fireworks never let off in November 1939 were available for Victory Celebrations in May 1945. · · · · · · · · The reason I remember being happy at this school was because I very quickly found myself a character I could accept, could even be pleased with. I found I enjoyed school work, and that, most surprisingly, I was very good at it. I do not think I realised at that time that I had been sorted out as not worth a grammar school education, and that I was not really competing on the same level any longer. But relatively this was unimportant. This newfound confidence was almost wholly due to my class-teacher, Mr Proffitt, a wonderful teacher, full of that kind of enthusiasm which flattered boys by appearing to assume that they were equals, by its sheer communication to them: a man who, I see now, must have overcome the liability of his physical appearance—he was small, about fifty, bald, red-beaked, dry-skinned and he wore metalrimmed spectacles and slummocky grey tweed suits: an invitation to disrespect—by outstanding teaching technique, by his character alone. My first-year class respected him completely: I do not remember him ever having even to threaten physical punishment. I still respect his memory more than that of any other teacher I ever had. Now I see it was perhaps his intelligent resentment of the educational system which had declared us to be less than first-rate and implied that therefore we were hardly worth bothering with, even at our own levels, that he tried so hard and so successfully with us: he was so good, particularly with those whom must just have missed grammar school entry: he gave so much to us, put so much into his lessons, organising them so well that they stretched the abilities of the best of us, yet still were not beyond the capacities to learn at least something of the worst of us . . . But perhaps I go too far, project an ideal teacher on to his memory: but not very far past the truth. · · He taught us English, besides being our form master. We did not even resent him calling us by our surnames all the time. · · At the end of that first term, Xmas 1944 it must have been, we had exams, and I came second of the whole class. It was my first evidence of something I had always hoped, had in a way known but not believed: that I was in some ways at least better than others, that though I was working-class and embarrassed by my clothes, I was yet better than some others at some things. The confidence this gave me was enormous, of acute importance, and it was given very satisfying public acknowledgement when, at the beginning of the spring term, Mr Proffitt arranged us in the order in which we had come in the December exams: there, at the back to the teacher’s right, sat the boy who had come first, I forget his name, another quiet boy, and I, in one double desk. I was particularly encouraged because the two hitherto established stars of the class, Nobbs and French, to whom I had until Xmas considered myself far inferior, had come third and fourth, and were now to my right in another double desk. · · · · · I can remember only one of Mr Proffitt’s lessons in detail, one in which he coaxed us into telling him of what wood pencils were made, and how pre-war Japanese pencils were of such poor quality that they tended to break very easily: because they were not made of the best wood: cedarwood. But many elements in my basic education must have had their foundation in Mr Proffitt’s classroom. · · While none of the other teachers commanded my respect as Mr Proffitt did, I can remember several of them very closely. The geography master, tall, sunburnt, bald, taught calmly and well. He once asked for volunteers to take a message to Spring Grove school, and, even though I did not know exactly where this was, I volunteered and was acce
pted. It was raining, and the way led down the hill from the other side away from my copse, or spinney, a path across a sloping field which could be seen from this teacher’s classroom. I was told not to run, but did so very briefly down that path: I can see myself from that classroom, and as myself on that path: a double vision. One boy reproached me for running, when I returned, I forget who he was, pettily. · · There was a music teacher who kept very strict discipline: even from the piano, a specially short cross-strung one, ah, over which he could look whilst playing. We sang—I can’t remember, but it has words by Pope, years later I learned at college the words were by Pope—yes, Where’er You Walk, that was it. And one day I heard that teacher’s voice, as strict and disciplinary as ever, on a schools broadcast when I was myself a teacher and one afternoon used the BBC programme to cover up that I could not myself teach music. · · I remember the headmaster coming into my class only once, and my answering correctly his question about the name of the Bramaputra river in northern India—is it?—and him insisting that neither a forward nor a backward slant was desirable in handwriting. Oh, and a mnemonic he taught us, that I still use, as to how to tell port from starboard: With a bottle of port you can never pour it all out, there’s always a drop left. · · The only one I remember disliking was the history teacher, a graduate I suspect, who was in his early twenties, curlyhaired, with darkrimmed glasses: and him only because he breathed rancidly over me, too often, once was too often, garlic I imagine now, though then it seemed connected with small black sticks like charcoal that he chewed during lessons. He went up for the VE celebrations, on VE Day, and told us about it, about waiting in front of Buckingham Palace for the King and Queen and Mr Churchill. I was not impressed even then: I just wanted to go home, and resented him, not a Londoner, being able to go there when I was still forced to be down at High Wycombe. He kept the library, a dark place for some reason, in this new light building, not a very good one, as I remember, full of old books in tatty bindings, some without spines, perhaps inherited from some older school. · · A hobby I picked up at Scale Lane was religion, which was fostered fervently by the gym master, ironically enough, in his lunch-hours. Every day—it seems like every day—a group of boys would meet in his gym and hold a bible-study session: at least, that is what I think they were called. One of us would select a passage from the Bible, read it, and then expound on it, with the object of illumination for all. It was a hobby, yes, now I look back: there was involved no question of belief. I could have done the same for any other text on any other subject, I imagine, at that time, for I made it all up, the interpretation. But it pleased the gym master, I assume, that we would thus be exposed to such as he thought good. Would it worry him that in my case it has done me no good at all? Rather, I hate the propaganda of such as he, or his church, of his god. But perhaps such hatred does not have its origins in what he tried to do: I feel no real malevolence towards his memory, I still remember the guilt I felt for some time at not corresponding with him after I had returned to London, and I still have the Bible he inscribed (though someone else had given it to me) some time during that period at High Wycombe. · · · · · The boys at that school I remember far less well. Nobbs seems to have been thin faced, handsome, with fairish hair, while French was definitely roundfaced, large-headed, with very fair hair. I went up to French’s house once, on the west side of the town, near the Thames Valley bus station: but the only thing I recall is that we were in the kitchen and someone told me French’s granny cut his hair, ha ha: perhaps it was French’s granny. And there were some girls there, French could attract girls. · · · · · · · · It becomes confused here. At the point! Did I find no friends at this school? Was I isolated there? Is this the point it begins, where I find the cause? Think harder! · · · · · · · · It seems I was satisfied with the friendship of the boys who lived at Mrs Davies’s: perhaps we were a close group, as if a family. At the end of the war, towards the end, that is, these boys went home, one by one, until I alone was left with Mrs Davies, perhaps that was when she took me to the pictures and gave me half her Mars bar? But there was a boy at Scale Lane I had become friendly with, Bates, his name was, I called him Batesy, they all did, who offered me his friendship, and I remember him doing so on a school stairway, that sort of glitter in the composition, when I had told him the last of Mrs Davies’s boys had gone or was going: and I said, No, I preferred to be a lone wolf. That was my actual cliché, I remember using it, remember the definite sense of foreboding, thrill, of the term, of the romantic loneliness I was choosing for myself. · · · · · Now that should seem important, that is as obvious a cause—no, as clear an example, an early example, of my isolation, as I have yet dredged up. But of what importance is it? Ah . . . · · · · · · · · But I did become friendly enough with Batesy, did with him whatever it was I had to do that involved a second, though I always kept the main part of myself within me. Remember shooting an arrow into Batesy’s bare leg just above his boy scout’s sock, with the two green bands on navy, and it made a just pierced round blue mark. The arrows were thin shoots of a reddish-barked shrub, ideal for the purpose, having a heart of hard white wood which sharpened well. I shot at Batesy’s leg out of boredom, from about a yard, and was surprised that he did not retaliate or even appear to dislike me after the first sharp pain had passed. That was up on Keep Hill, beyond the sledge-slopes. Mrs Davies did not like me going around with Batesy, no, and perhaps he knew this: perhaps this is why he put up with my shooting an arrow into his leg, that I was in some way superior to him, could withdraw my company from him? A bit fanciful. Was Batesy a member of an undesirable class that Mrs Davies should want me to have nothing to do with him? Were there lower classes than the one I belonged to? I had not thought so, no, I had not thought so. Perhaps Mrs Davies wanted to keep me to herself? It does not seem likely. But certainly contact with Batesy lessened, and when I left High Wycombe I do not remember saying goodbye to him. · · · · · As for girls: there were two as I remember, only two. The first had the same surname as myself but sent back my only note, tentatively arranging a meeting, with the most untentative repulse, listing as places we would not meet, one by one, all those I had suggested. She was several years older, but the second girl, who lived just a few doors away, at a butcher’s shop, strangely enough, was more my own age, twelve, at this time, and I used to exchange abuse with her, for a period of some months, nothing more, until finally I was able to insult her by telling her I was leaving High Wycombe, and she me by saying Good riddance. · · It was difficult to meet girls while at Mrs Davies’s, or perhaps it was that I grew shy with puberty. · · Two other girls I remember meeting, being keen on, in connection with some expedition made with the scouts, involving a trek cart, carting stuff of some sort or another from one part of High Wycombe to a Fête, where we gave kids rides on the trek cart and broke the shaft of it by dropping it when loaded on to the path. There were three of us, and I think we must have picked up these girls there, perhaps they were girl guides, at that Fête, two of them: yes, I felt left out, that the other two would get the girls, perhaps they even knew each other, from before, or one of them did, while I knew only the boys, neither of the girls, until the Fête, until that day. We took the trek cart back to headquarters, and one boy said he would report it to the scoutmaster next day. Then we went with the girls to the fair which was that week on the Rye. I did not feel out of it, then, five was a loose number, we all gave. But I had to leave early because my mother was coming down for the weekend, that evening: ironic, that she who came so rarely chose the evening just when I—so rarely too—had something else which might have kept me from missing her. For the missing was a constant of my life. And when I was forming a real part of some sort of group—but something would have happened, it always did, to throw me back, yet again. My mother slept in Mrs Davies’s room upstairs that night. I was glad to see her. I took h
er a cup of tea that Sunday morning. She suddenly said Listen! I heard the drone of an aircraft. It passed us and began to fade. Then suddenly it stopped. A buzzbomb, said my mother. There was a dull explosion some way away, and then she told me about the buzzbombs or Vls they were having in London, and I was terrified for her. That bomb landed in Hughenden Manor, I believe, if that was the name of the place, harmlessly. It was the first around High Wycombe: later there were others, in some way off their set course for London. My very occasional weekends in London with my mother and grannie were now no longer allowed. Perhaps that is why on this occasion my mother had come down to see me. The scouts I joined twice: different troops, that is. At one time I was in the scouts and the cubs at the same time, shook fearfully at some singing jamboree as Akela saw me in my scouts’ uniform but said nothing, to my relief. The first scouts took me under age because I was big, and pushed me through tenderfoot very easily: it was enough for them that I could repeat knots once under instruction though I certainly could not do them the day afterwards. It was this troop’s trek cart that I helped to break. Later, at Scale Lane I joined another troop, more keenly run, which I enjoyed hardly more. It was not that I was not interested in what they were doing, for I was: but I wanted to be interested in my own way, I wanted to enjoy myself in my own way, which was not necessarily their way. I failed as a member of that group as I have failed as a member of all groups I have ever joined: gangs, schools, cliques, churches, cubs, scouts, youthclubs, football teams, cricket teams, tugofwar teams, tennis doubles, all of them. · · As here, too, it is repeated: for I am on this trawler, on the crew list a supernumerary, even, but not of the ship. · · Even from Mrs Davies and the boys I became estranged, towards the end, mainly because of that eagerness for knowledge promoted by Mr Proffitt, my capacity for observing too much: so that no topic of conversation could arise from either her or the other boys, it seemed, without I would say, I know, and soon my I know became a catchphrase of ridicule and attack against me. But I did know, I would say to myself: and perhaps here my arrogance began, perhaps this surprisingly again showed me I was better even than certain adults: or it may be that I knew it all the time, and this was merely confirmation. · · · · · This observance was part of a visual excitement which took its most extreme form in the photographing of everything catching that attention with a pretend camera, which was a small metal object, cylindrical, about half an inch deep and one in diameter, with a sighting hole and a clicking catch: I picked it up on a tip, with one too for Batesy, and I cannot imagine what it was designed for originally. A real camera I remember seeing only once, when my mother came down, it was probably the same weekend I first heard a buzzbomb: a camera she had borrowed, and managed to find a film for, as they were very scarce in wartime, or so I believed, and we took some snaps, I would call them, up on West Wycombe hill, near the Mausoleum. · · · · · Letters from my father, from North Africa, from Italy, from Germany, photographed letters, small, the paper crackling, just reproduced largely enough to read: saying all the things we would do after the war was over. · · · · · I was infected with the details of the war, with the war, wanted to fly, read every Biggles book several times, and the Aeromodeller, made models which rarely flew, when they were meant to, and solid models which I wished were meant to, since they were easier to make. Even at one point started a programme of self-training to fit me for the Air Force as a pilot at eighteen: I think a book, some sort of training manual, came into my hands at this time, and it was this which started me off. It was my first great enthusiasm: and like others since I kept it secret, guarded it against the ridicule of others, the dampening of others. This must have been when the other boys at Mrs Davies’s had gone, when I was thrown more in upon myself, that I kept it to myself. This enthusiasm for flying continued until the time I was due to go for National Service, when I opted for the RAF, told Dorothy I just wanted to make sure I flew in the next war, underwent aircrew selection tests at Hornchurch before actually being called up to see if I could make the thing a career, passed as a radio operator but was failed on medical grounds with the perforated eardrum scarlet fever had left me with as a child of three; and was discharged the service accordingly. · · Now I do not want to fly, have not since then wanted to fly: perhaps I may again one day as a hobby: yet I remember the passionate enthusiasm with which I wanted to fly, then, for years, and wonder at the waxing and waning of enthusiasm. Perhaps the only happy man is the one who has no enthusiasms: but perhaps that cannot be achieved without having at least an enthusiasm for not having enthusiasms. That is too easy: what use are such statements? · · Another enthusiasm at the same time, which must be connected, I think, have been incorporated in the self-discipline, self-reliance, was a secret society I formed with Batesy. It had its headquarters in a certain tree, difficult to climb, but low, hawthorn I think it must have been, where we hid all kinds of formulae, little bottles of pink Anadin liquid, the occasional unused Durex we found in its packet, matches, and other valuables. Two other kids we allowed to belong to this society, who were not very enthusiastic, who did not turn up to meetings very often: when Batesy and I saw them once some weeks later they did not even seem to remember belonging. But someone found all the things in HQ, robbed us, and we found these two and accused them: they denied betraying the society, but we thumped them just in case. Batesy and I were bigger than they were, but not by much. This society was perhaps an expression of a desire to lead, to organise. Not that I wanted to lead—I saw nothing good in that—but that things had to be led, things had to be organised: and other people did not seem very good at this—, no that’s not it, exactly. Some people were: Mrs Davies was well organised, Mr Proffitt and the school were well organised: but there were other things which were not, and if I did not do it then I saw nobody did. A common fallacy. But I did. I think I tried to arrange something similar, a society or a camp, in a furniture · · CRAANGK! · · Ah, yet again! · · Yes. Now, the secret society, flying, no, another society, this time in a factory where they made chairs, or rather the factory woodyard, a camp in amongst the great piles of seasoning beechwood, stretchers between each piece to allow air to circulate: but we too often were found there and chased out by workmen, especially when we drew attention to ourselves by riding a wheeled platform on those short stretches of rail intended for moving stacks of wood about the yard. On one occasion a great splintered shaft, of triangular section, fell on George, the sharp ragged side gashing his forehead and nose: we led him home screaming, streaming blood our handkerchiefs could not absorb, to Mrs Davies, who washed and bathed him and found the wound of course to be far less bad than it looked. That could not have been connected with the society, John, or George, was it? had gone home by then, gone back to London. But we played in the woodyards at various times at High Wycombe, not just me on my own towards the end. · · · · · Mrs Davies had a cousin who worked in a very good baker’s shop in the town where we used to go on Saturdays and buy a lardy-cake, which was a wonderful cake, the lardy-cake, with— · · What bloody relevance has a sodding lardy-cake to me now? I’ve had enough of High Wycombe and being evacuated: surely I must have exhausted it by now, the pain must be exorcised, the tedium of interest, of making myself regurgitate all this: for what? · · Think, then, analyse, then, this estrangement from home, from London, parents, younger self. · · · · · · · · Blank. · · What use are analyses, reasons, causes? All I am left with are just things, happenings: things as they are, happenings as they have happened and go on happening through the unreliable filter of my memory. But try. What else is there to do? · · · · · First, the obvious. The pain of being parted from my parents was far greater, and more real, than the danger from bombing, from dying. The given reasons for my being evacuated—that I would be out of danger, with its corrollary that therefore they were in danger—was unacceptable, or seems so now, for at the time
I had no choice but acceptance. The thought of my mother or my father being killed, which I could conceive, was far worse than the thought of myself being killed, which I could not as meaningfully conceive. If any of us had to die, I wanted it to be together. This thought was often with me, but not exactly as a thought—I could not have formulated it like that then—but rather as a threat, as an accompaniment to everything I did. · · Was the liberality of my parents—I remember having ten or fifteen shillings and sometimes as much as a pound a week pocketmoney in the years after I came home, immediately after the war, when I was only twelve or thirteen—was this in some way (for they had little money) an attempt to make up for sending me away during the war? A payment in acknowledgement of their debt for my neglect? Perhaps. Perhaps not. · · Yet I know of others in my generation who were evacuated and who look back on this period as a golden one in their lives, who were sent deep into the country, to great houses in Somerset, to America even, and to whom life has never been so wonderful with their parents as it was away from them, whose characters were beautifully formed and transformed by this transplantation from London to some alien place. Perhaps I went to a graceless town, appropriately but not gladly to the working-class part, as well, and perhaps my complaints were too easily countered with promises that all would be different after the war, that all lacks were attributable to the war: and of course this was not so, and of course I was affected by the disappointment that nothing was ever after the war as good as it had been promised to be—as I have said, I repeat myself. . . . · · · · · Back, where I was, where I am. Sleep. · · Long sleep.
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