‘So! Is there an ‘and’?’
‘Yes. You’ll want to make use of my name and experience, won’t you?’
‘Of course. But we won’t pay a cent more than our offer.’
‘That’s your business. But I would be doing injury to my business genius [by all accounts he really spoke like this] and glorious name if I took less than five percent gross on all the money received by you.’
‘For one year?’
‘No,’ I said blandly, ‘for fifteen years.’
In the event Culbertson wasn’t finished. The deal only gave the buyers the American rights. The ‘world’ would cost them more. The buyers walked out, but Culbertson knew they would be back. ‘The road they have yet to travel, I thought, is very much shorter than that which they have travelled already. They’ll come around.’
And they did. We all did.
19. Bloody Culbertson
BY THE END of the decade, when my father learned bridge, there was no authority other than Culbertson. A distinctively British style of play had yet to emerge. One was in preparation, being tried and tested by a brilliant group of men in London – but the war would interrupt their efforts. For the moment, Culbertson was bridge and bridge was Culbertson.
‘Oh, Culbertson of course,’ said my uncle George, when I asked him who had guided the hands of the family when they learned bridge. ‘Definitely Culbertson. The Blue Book. It was always the bloody Blue Book. Took me years to recover.’ George is the only living witness to my father’s journey to South Africa and it is he who gives me some sense of what it was like.
After the golden summer, the autumn of 1939 comes coldly to the Balfour household in Greenbank Road, Edinburgh. According to my uncle George, a new reality takes hold. Perhaps as the eldest son Dad feels it more than his brothers. He is thirteen, old enough to be thinking about what he might do with his life. Old enough to think about the wider world. The radio is on in the corner with its incessant news of war, and yet he finds the war uninteresting. He is more interested in the physical world. He wants to know how and why things work the way they do. He likes systems and rules. He likes things to be predictable. He dislikes – distrusts – emotion. I am not surprised to learn that, when his uncle Willie presents him with a perfect world, the world of bridge, he takes to it with ease and delight.
Certainly, it helps to pass the long evenings.
But the way George describes it, it is clear there are also tensions in the house and long periods of silence. My grandfather turns down a promotion, which would have meant moving from their house in Edinburgh to some smaller city. And another disaster has struck. My grandmother is found to have a malignant tumour in her leg. There is no option but to amputate. She agrees and the operation is performed. They give her a prosthetic limb, but things will never be the same. Her leg causes her great grief and she compensates through an excess of zeal in disciplining the children. Even so, the boys seem a little beyond her and so she is excessively harsh on my aunt, Margaret, who is by this time sixteen years old. Margaret becomes a surrogate mother to the boys.
My grandparents try to maintain the appearance of normality. Their faith remains strong and their politics remain conservative. They disapprove of Hitler, but fear socialism and communism. They despair at the revolutions of the east. They wonder what to do with the children.
For the fact is that home is becoming an uncomfortable place to be. The war, the distant war, has settled on Britain like a dark fog. Christmas has come and gone and hostilities have hardly commenced, let alone ended. And even that is not really the issue. The real difficulty lies at home where Rose takes out her anger at her disability on anything and everyone around her. There is a suggestion – though heaven help anyone who articulates it – that my grandmother cannot quite cope, and I am not surprised. Although the house is a bungalow, it lies on a steep hill and there are many steps about. Even with her new prosthetic leg, the shortest journey must have been a great effort. My grandparents, no doubt, are drinking a little more than they should each evening. Tempers are easily frayed. The easy domestic rhythms of the preceding decade have been broken. For a family so determinedly focused on its own affairs, the war seems an impertinence they are powerless to prevent.
There is one possibility that might help. They could send ‘the boys’ away for the duration of the war. One of Rose’s oldest friends, who is known within the family as ‘Nelly Bell’, has settled in South Africa where she is a highly successful school headmistress. She writes to suggest that the boys be sent to her. She will take care of their education. Tom and Rose should not worry. Bursaries and scholarships are available and she will take care of any shortfall. There are good Catholic schools; it will be perfect for the boys. They corresponded often and Nelly Bell would have been fulsome in her praise of the beneficial effects on young minds of a colonial upbringing, where boys especially had the space to run free and would learn how to be men free from the constraints of class that so hampered those who grew up in Britain.
My grandparents debate this. The advantages both for them and the boys are obvious. South Africa, land of plenty, land of sunshine, will be good for them. They will get away from the war. Their going will ease the burden on my grandmother. Nelly Bell will take care of them. The disadvantages are less obvious and easy to gloss over. And so, after a time of debate, the decision is made. The boys will be sent to South Africa to attend St Aidan’s College, a Jesuit school, in Grahamstown. It is only the three boys. Margaret, my aunt and the eldest child, must remain at home to help her mother. And Brian, the youngest, is only three years old and too young to be sent away. And so the decision is made; the boys are to go to South Africa.
South Africa is, in any case, not as distant or as scary as it might have been for other families. As a child, Rose had spent some time there when her father went to seek (and found) his fortune, but it was not a place of which she had fond memories. Her parents parted company early. The story is that my great-grandmother made it as far as the railway junction of de Aar in the northern Cape before she turned back, disgusted by the heat and the dust, the rough and ready nature of what was still frontier life. She returned with Rose first to Ireland and then to Scotland where money from the gold mines paid for her to attend a respectable series of boarding schools. But after she left school the money stopped. She and her mother were not ‘in the inheriting line’. She would have to earn her own way, which she did through teaching.
Once the decision is made, three metal trunks are purchased, one for each boy, and in the weeks preceding their departure the trunks stand in the sitting room. The trunks become a symbol of the journey. They promise adventure and excitement and something new, and everybody learns to ignore the clang when they close, like the sound of prison bars slamming shut.
Rose watches silently while the boys make stencils and paint their names on each trunk.
It seems curious to me that in the photograph taken to record this momentous departure there is no look of fear or concern on my father’s face, only a mildly amused curiosity that his parents are bothering with this visit to the photographer’s studio. My father, the eldest and tallest by a distance, sits in the middle. To his right is Robin, the second son, who could have picked a fight in an empty house and whose temper would in future years become the stuff if not of legend exactly, then at least of considerable concern. And to his left is George, the youngest of the three travellers. Even then, George looks diffident and shy, intelligent but a little nervous, as though he alone of the three has some sense of what is to come. For look at Tom and Robin. Tom has his arm about each brother, but on the second glance I can see that his fingers are curled round and digging into the soft spot just below Robin’s kidneys. And, on seeing this, I realise why Robin is wearing an expression of suppressed comic outrage and why, indeed, he is holding his arms in such a manner as to deliver with his left elbow a short sharp jab to my father’s ribs.
For the younger boys, then, this is something of an a
dventure and both my surviving uncles confirm that for days and weeks and months before the departure their great tin trunks stood in the bay window of the house in Greenbank Road and gradually filled up with the accoutrements that would be required for the journey and for the months to come. Telegrams are exchanged with Nelly Bell. Will they need coats? Hats? They go on shopping expeditions and make lists. Things are put in the trunks and taken out again.
At the same time, Dad is uneasy in these newly shifting sands. Nothing seems to hold. The bedrock of family, church and school is ripped up without so much as a by-your-leave. ‘It is for the best,’ his father assures him. ‘It will make you a man,’ says Rose, which I think he suspected to be true, but on the surface he chose not to believe either of them. He bears the burden of responsibility. He is old enough to know that this is not just an adventure. Then, and for the rest of his life, he feels betrayed: by his mother for making the decision, and by his father for acquiescing to it. He feels powerless – needless to say, ‘the boys’ were not consulted in this decision. He feels alone; both his mother and father admonish him repeatedly to look after ‘the little ones’. Despite reaching puberty, he is not yet ready to renounce his claims to be a boy. But no one is charged with looking after him. It was too late. Like it or not, he was the man of the party and he was expected to behave like one.
The day comes for them to leave. They ‘get out’ just in time, sailing from Glasgow on the City of Paris. The Blitz on Britain’s provincial cities is about to begin. The boys are a little scared, but they hide it well.
‘It is,’ so my uncle George says as his parting shot to his mother on the day of their departure, ‘the best day of my life.’
Dad says nothing. He has learned to hold his tongue. He is not yet fourteen but it will be nine years before he sees his parents again.
20. Freetown
THEY HEAD WEST, for there are U-boats about. The route from Glasgow takes them ‘as close to Iceland as we could get without hitting it’, before they turn south to travel in more or less a straight line through the Atlantic. Every day on board there are rumours. A U-boat has been sighted a few miles off the port bow. Another ship has been sunk and gone down with all hands. There are forty-five other children on board, including my uncles Robin and George, and four or five times as many servicemen who are being despatched to South Africa or Aden. One morning, they wake to find the engines thundering. A tannoy announcement informs all on board that this time it is for real; they are taking evasive action and are to stand by for further information.
According to George, it is a mix of the thrilling and the banal. They tighten the straps on their lifejackets and try to see what is happening. Their chaperones tell them to stay still and keep their heads down. Minutes pass ... but ‘nothing happens’. They find themselves instead with a damaged engine because the captain had pushed the ship too hard for too long in his efforts to avoid the U-boats. But at least they are clear of U-boat range. They turn west again, and for several days they limp across the glassy ocean before pulling into Freetown, Sierra Leone, for repairs. Here the ship is besieged by traders offering all kinds of goods for sale or exchange. The children are warned not to talk to them, nor to buy anything. It is here that my uncle has his one clear memory of the journey, for my father, in a characteristic display of enterprise and droit de seigneur, takes it upon himself to trade his brother’s slippers (purchased only a few short weeks before at the Marks and Spencer store in Princes Street) for three dozen mangoes, as a consequence of which the boys are all violently sick and to a man forswear mangoes (and indeed most fruit) for the rest of their lives. When not ‘fencing stolen goods’ (as George puts it), Dad plays on the deck or reads, or watches the passing waves, no doubt with a mix of pleasure and tedium. From his trunk, he draws a pack of cards and tries to engage others – soldiers, too – in games of bridge. In this he is mostly unsuccessful for they wish to play for money and reckon (rightly) that my father will not provide them with sufficient wealth to merit the indignity of being seen to fleece a mere boy.
I have read of games of bridge played on the interminable journeys in defence of one part of the Empire or another. Private Stanley Anderson, for example, who was wounded by shrapnel on 22 July 1944, recalls playing bridge on his troopship home across the Atlantic. He had just made up a four ‘(even though none of us knew how to keep score) when the ship’s PA system came alive with the news that the war in Europe was over.’ They feared it might be a rumour or a sick joke, but ‘when we were issued two bottles of beer each, we had to believe it must be true.’
Troops or no troops, my father has his brothers to teach and, while Robin shows a stubborn reluctance to engage, George is a willing student and happy hours pass crouched over the pack of cards and a tattered copy of the Blue Book.
It’s not always easy. There are periodic alarms, and they have to wear their lifejackets at all times. At night, the lifejackets are next to them in their bunk beds. There are lifeboat drills to practise – one passenger recalls that, after a week, they had got it so that all children would be in the lifeboats in less than three minutes. Before reaching Freetown, they are all dosed with quinine to prevent malaria, which is ‘foul’, and have to ‘smear themselves with ointment’ if they go out after sunset as a guard against mosquitoes and other insects. Every morning, they have lectures from their government-appointed chaperone on ‘travel, South Africa and divinity’, and one imagines my father would have thought he knew all there was to know about two of the three. South Africa, in the imagination of the boys, looms large, informed by the long list of Victorian writers and especially by Buchan and Kipling.
South of Freetown, they stay closer to the African coast. My father must have marvelled at the deep brown of the waters that surround the mouth of the River Congo. I have read, for instance, of the wonder it caused Joseph Conrad when he arrived as a servant of the Société Anonyme Belge pour la Commerce du Haut Congo only fifty years before. During that voyage, even before he arrived at Boma and witnessed Belgium’s criminal exploitation of the Congo, Conrad had begun to have doubts about the colonial project. ‘Day after day the coastline was unchanging, as if the vessel were making no progress.’ He regards the few settlements that they do pass as ‘sordid’ and ‘dreary’ and detects the ease with which one might go mad when, as far as the eye can see, there is ‘nothing but ocean, sky, and the hair-thin green strip of bush vegetation’ and he writes of a stationary warship, a ‘ponderous vessel’ that ‘rose and fell on the slimy swell’ and on whose mast the ensign hung limply. There is no sign of settlement on the shore but ‘at regular intervals the long six-inch guns fired off shells into the unknown African continent, with neither purpose nor aim.’
I have read other accounts – for example, of the four Grangemouth children who were amongst the seavacs rescued from a torpedoed ship while being sent to Canada by the Children’s Overseas Relocation Board. When interviewed, all four said they heard no explosion but received a warning by bell. The alarm came at 11.30 p.m. when the children were all in bed. They had, however, been warned to sleep in their clothes and so it was only a matter of finding their coats and shoes and making their way to the lifeboats. ‘None of the children,’ according to newspaper reports, ‘showed any fear or feeling of nervousness.’ When they arrived safely in port, they were handed a card with a tartan-bound sprig of heather through it on which were printed these words:
‘Warmest Congratulations.
We are all proud of your bravery.
Good luck.
From Mr Geoffrey Shakespeare,
Chairman, C.O.R.B.’
My father and his brothers did not come under the aegis of the Children’s Overseas Relocation Board; theirs was a private enterprise, and in any case he had as his protector Eileen Nelson who was more scary and better resourced than any number of government agencies dedicated to the welfare of their citizens. I am sure that she would have agreed with the parents of these four children when interviewed
by their local newspaper. They were adamant that evacuation was the best possible course for their children and they would sail again as soon as another boat became available. The children too were unanimous in their desire to go. When they did, they were each given a copy of the collected poems of Robert Burns, a souvenir of their native land for them to carry to their deaths or to Canada, whichever came first.
Fortunately, the brothers had no need of Mr Shakespeare’s luck, although they did have the collected works of Robert Burns. Somewhere south of Luanda, Dad celebrates his fourteenth birthday. His brothers tease him for being old. A few days after that, an early-morning bell wakes them from their sleep – no doubt, the same bell that would have woken them had they been hit by a torpedo. They come on deck to be greeted by the sight of Table Bay in all its glory, a soft white cloth on Table Mountain and the city gleaming majestically below it. A voice on the tannoy says, ‘Welcome to Cape Town.’ For George – who has already told his mother that leaving home was ‘the best day of his life’ – this is the second best day. The sea is calm and sparkling and the city below the mountain seems to shine with promise.
Dad never spoke of this arrival, nor indeed of the departure, but many others have. Margaret Wood, another child evacuee sent out to South Africa three weeks earlier than my father, writes of the expectation that this would be only a short interlude. The war would be over ‘by Christmas’. They would all be home soon. But at least they were well looked after. ‘When we crossed the line (the equator) we had a big party, it was very riotous and ended by putting bread and jam down each others [sic] backs.’
The succeeding days are a whirl of meetings and press calls during which Robin and George, though not Dad, manage to get themselves photographed in Adderley Street with the Governor. Their picture appears in the following morning’s papers. Fifty years later, Madge Wear, who was an escort for boys on a similar trip in 1940, recalled the thrill of these delights. ‘Picking fruit off the trees was another forgotten luxury, and they all had bananas and oranges given to them – the first they had seen since 1939. My first memory was seeing Cape Town ablaze with lights at night – so strange after our blackout.’ Dad and his brothers stay in dormitories on the property of the Governor’s residence, which is then called Westbrook. ‘You must be the Scots evacuees,’ George remembers the Governor saying, ‘Help yourself to some strawberries.’ Strawberries! Sun! Help yourself! Such luxury.
Vulnerable in Hearts Page 14