by Bryan Magee
One morning I was late, and missed them. Out of the house I pelted, in a hurry to catch them up. So heedlessly did I scuttle across the main road – looking the wrong way, because I was looking for my friends – that I ran almost under the wheels of a car. There was a screaming of brakes as the car knocked me to the ground. Because I had my back to it I was thrown forward on my knees. I picked myself up, thinking I was unhurt, and assured the driver I was okay. But then, as he drove away, I began to shake uncontrollably. So I turned and headed back home. As I was approaching my front gate I felt a stinging in my knees. This caused me to look down for the first time, and I saw blood pouring down the front of both legs. At this I broke into howls and sobs, not having been in the least disposed to cry up to that point. Even at the time I knew that it was seeing my legs streaming with blood that was making me yell, not the pain. My injuries were superficial – I had simply scraped a lot of the skin off my knees – but I carry the scar tissue to this day.
On our daily walks down Pound Hill each of us carried a gas mask at the hip, its stiff cardboard box in a bag slung from the shoulder. The whole population of England was carrying these things now. No one ever needed to use them for a gas attack because there never were any gas attacks, but we children often had a gas-mask drill at school, and that came to be what I thought of gas masks as being for. Their boxes had a practical use, too, which was to carry our sandwiches. There were no such things as school dinners, only school milk, so we took sandwiches to school. My grandmother, who remains to this day the worst cook I have ever known, was also the worst sandwich-maker. She cut the bread thick, to keep me well nourished, and had no understanding that for sandwiches to be appetising they need to be moist.
The school was in a street behind the main road. It was the first time since infant school that I had been in a class with girls, and I regarded this as an improvement. It made the atmosphere more interesting, without preventing the boys from having their usual fun among themselves. There was one girl of about the same age as me who aroused in me feelings that were new and strange. Whenever I looked at her I felt a rosy glow all over, with an odd sort of pleasure that made not only my skin go warm but my insides as well. I enjoyed this feeling so much that I tried to get it with other girls – I looked at each one in the class in turn, hoping to find it, but that was no good. It happened only with this one. Her name was Morag Macdonald. She was pretty, quiet, perhaps a little on the plump side but not too much so; her skin was unusually white, her eyes and hair dark. I spent hours looking at her secretly, enjoying pleasant feelings of longing. What it was a longing for I had no idea, and did not even question: it was just a sort of general yearning; but it was very nice. I do not think she felt any of the vibrations of my interest, or even noticed me on the other side of the class. I never attempted to say anything to her about it, indeed would not have known what to say. Actually there was nothing to say. It was not a question of saying. I just loved looking at her. She has been a happy memory for me for the rest of my life. I have no idea what happened to her after the autumn of 1939. She was then between nine and eleven years old, so as I write these words she must be either in her mid-seventies or dead.
She is the only child in that class whose name I remember. But there are several others whom I clearly recall as people. There were identical twin boys whom most of the girls could tell apart but most of the boys – including me – could not. There was a girl who was the same age as the rest of us but more grown-up, more sophisticated, with exciting adult attitudes to everything, interesting to talk to. There was a boy who embarrassed everyone by bringing God, Jesus Christ or the Church into every conversation, no doubt under influence from home. The teacher felt that this was not something he could reprimand a child for, so he let it go on, but was as embarrassed as the rest of us, and we could see him fending off opportunities for it to happen.
The teacher was a Mr Saintey (that spelling may be wrong). He was in his forties, balding and bespectacled, with a heavy limp from a wound acquired in the First World War. He was funny and jolly on the surface, and successful in winning popularity with the class, but hard underneath, ruthless if crossed. Like a clown warming up an audience he would burst beaming into the classroom every day shouting: ‘Good morning, boys and girls!’ at which we all had to rise to our feet and shout back: ‘Good morning, Mr Saintey!’ Most of the children enjoyed this, it got them going, but I found myself resenting having to greet somebody in terms laid down by himself. He was, I think, more intelligent than the teachers I was used to: he understood us better, and taught us more, but unlike those others he thought we were a lot of perishers, and felt no real concern for us. I expect his chief need, and problem, was to keep himself interested.
He used a wider range of teaching methods than I was used to, and to good effect. Each morning we would listen to the BBC radio broadcast for schools, programmes of whose existence I had not known. Why our teachers in Hoxton had not seized on them with gratitude I do not know. The impact those programmes had on me is illustrated by the fact that I have remembered some of them ever since – for instance one about Alaric, one about the Crucifixion, and a whole series about Toytown. The first two, and others like them, were my introduction to the treatment of historical characters as if they were recognisable human beings, with credible motivations and ordinary human relationships. It was the first time I thought of Jesus as a person.
In addition to making us listen to these radio programmes, Mr Saintey had us devising our own quizzes, and engaging in debates with one another – all at a childish level, inevitably; but this was the first time I had done any of these things, and I found them mind-opening.
An auburn-haired woman called Mrs Campbell gave us singing lessons. She had a penchant for warlike traditional songs that swung along to zappy marching tunes. A typical verse (which I quote from memory, so there may be inaccuracies) was:
War we wage
For freedom’s heritage.
The cause is true
That urges to
The conflict’s close.
And peace shall crown
The warrior’s bright renown:
The fame of him
Who bore him well
In front of foes.
The fact that we actually were at war had, I think, nothing to do with her choice of songs. This was her repertoire, and she had been teaching it for years.
However, the fact that Britain was at war seemed to come into most things, including why I was there at all. There was a period of several months at the beginning of the Second World War which has acquired the nickname the Phoney War, when although the country was officially at war it was not actually doing any fighting. The months went by, the expected bombing of Britain’s cities failed to occur, and increasing numbers of people who had left them in a hurry drifted back to their abandoned homes – sometimes taking their children with them, though many saw here an opportunity to free themselves from their offspring. A result of this was that quite a few children managed to avoid schooling altogether during the war years; and many of these (including intelligent ones) grew up illiterate. Neither in the cities nor in the countryside could life be said to be carrying on as it had in peacetime. What Britain was really doing during this time was getting ready for war, so the whole character of civilian life was changing. It was not just that the young men were being called up into the armed forces: such things as rationing, the blackout, and the carrying of gas masks made ordinary day-to-day life different for everyone, including children. A general seriousness crept into the atmosphere, a sense of huge events impending, and of individuals and families having to relegate their own concerns to second place. We were developing the mentality of a people at war.
I accepted without thinking that the war required me to be away from my home and parents, in spite of the absence of bombing, because there were no schools left in London – I knew I had to go to school, and at home there would be no school to go to. My sister had left Londo
n with her school and was now uneasily billeted with a family of strangers in Huntingdon. Everyone, it seemed, was being moved around the country, sent away, shipped abroad, or whatever, and this was what it was going to be like for a long time. As most children do, I just got on with things, taking them for granted the way they were. In this frame of mind I spent the first Christmas of the war at the family home in Hoxton as someone in transit, no longer feeling that I lived there but seeing myself as being on a visit, passing through on my way to Market Harborough. I must have adapted myself with unusual intensity to each place of long-term stay, which then became my world, for from then on I always felt like a guest at home: my visits lasted only as long as the school holidays, and my actual life was always being lived somewhere else.
Apart from an infant stay in hospital, the opening three and a half months of the Second World War were the first period of more than two weeks that I had spent away from home, not only from my parents but also from Hoxton. After that, each move was one more change, one more way of life, one more world. But Worth was the first of my new worlds. For that reason it has remained a bigger experience than the fifteen or so weeks that it lasted might suggest. At long intervals through the years I have felt the need to go back there and stroll through the village, over the railway bridge to the church; to sit in a pew and contemplate the memorial to Ken Constable, and look at the chandeliers, and wander round the churchyard; and then walk back through the village again and down Pound Hill into Three Bridges, following the route that the gang of us used to take every day to school. Sometimes I would continue into Crawley. I would always, at some point, find myself standing in front of the bungalow, with the oak tree still there in its front garden, and wonder who lived there now, and hope that they were not looking out at me through one of their windows wondering what that stranger was doing standing there staring at their house. Now, alas, the bungalow is no more. A few years ago it was knocked down, and a proper house built in its place. But the oak tree is still there. And Miss Rutland’s bungalow is discernible as part of the enlarged house next door.
As things have turned out in my life, my period in Worth was the only time I have lived for more than two weeks in a village. While I was there I expected it to be for as long as the war lasted. Because I had no idea that my stay was going to be so short, my mental adjustment was to being there for ever: I dug in, so to speak, and thought of myself as living there. It is true that among the most pungent aspects of the experience were some negative ones, the chief being that it was not Hoxton, and that I was not living with my father. But there were positive ones too, if sometimes difficult to put into words – things to do with openness and sky, the field outside the kitchen door, the trees, first green and then gold … clambering around in trees, sitting in trees, talking endlessly in trees. The feeling that stays with me most keenly is of a close community of people surrounded by nothing at all; and the individual things I recall go right down to the various birds and insects, this goldfinch, that wasp, a particular fly, on a particular occasion.
CHAPTER SIX
WITHIN A DAY or two of my going to Worth to live with my grandmother, the school I had been at in Hoxton was evacuated to the Midlands. I did not hear accounts of this until some time afterwards, but when I did, I heard it talked about so much that it acquired a life of its own in my imagination. The children – each with a label hanging round his neck with his name and address, and each carrying a suitcase – were delivered by their families to Dalston Junction, a few hundred yards from Hoxton. From there they were taken by train to Euston. At Euston they found themselves checked off as one school among many. Thousands of children were being shepherded by their teachers in that great terminus, while extra-long trains stood waiting at the platforms. Then, school by school, the children were packed into the trains, until the corridors would hold no more, and the trains pulled out to their various destinations, the passengers having no idea where they were going. The train carrying the Edmund Halley school stopped first at Rugby. It let a school off there, and then crawled slowly back down another line, stopping at every station. At each stop a confabulation with local worthies took place on the platform which ended sometimes with a whole school getting off and sometimes with no one getting off. Finally, the Edmund Halley was the only school left on the train – and it now seemed to be heading back to London. Perhaps, they thought, they were going home again, there being no one to take them. But at last they were ordered out at a place called Market Harborough, then a town of fewer than eleven thousand people, of which not even the teachers had heard.
In the concourse outside the station, waiting to receive them, was a crowd of empty horse-drawn carts from surrounding farms. Teachers and children were packed into these, and off they clip-clopped into the centre of town, driving other traffic off the roads as they trotted the better part of a mile to the cattle market. Here the children were drawn up in rows, each standing behind his suitcase, while local people walked up and down picking the ones they wanted. The attitudes of these people differed enormously, I am told. Most were decent people who wanted to do something for the children, but some gave themselves patronising airs and made loud remarks, even jokes, about the poverty-stricken state of the urchins in front of them, while others were sharp-eyed shrewdies to whom small sums of money meant a lot and who had spotted here an opportunity to make some. A system was in place whereby the children’s parents in London paid maintenance money into the post office, and the families looking after the children drew it out – so if you could keep a child on less than you were paid, you could make a profit. All chose according to their own values: some opted for the most respectable-looking children, some for those evidently in need, some for those who looked least likely to give trouble – and some, I am sure, on other grounds. It was an open market for paedophiles, some of whose activities were later to come to our astonished ears.
I do not believe many of the host families could have seen slum children before, and the condition of the worst of them must have been a shock – the dirt, the lice, the rags, the bony, desperate white faces. There were some that nobody wanted, and these were taken by churches and other charities who sent representatives. For each child a home of some sort was found, to which he was taken straight away, and from which his new guardian had to write to his parents informing them where he was. In a matter of days the teachers, who themselves were billeted with local teachers, were calling round at the houses checking on the circumstances of their charges, and telling them where and when to go to school. As far as Edmund Halley was concerned, there was a Baptist church in the middle of town with assembly rooms attached, and these rooms were made available to the school as its long-term home. Within days of leaving central London, with no idea where it was going, the school was in operation in rural Leicestershire.
Much the same thing happened all over the country, with countless variations of circumstance. To most of those who experienced it, it remained one of the milestone experiences of life. A small literature has grown up about it. One of the myths perpetuated by a part of that literature is that these working-class children were billeted with middle-class families, with resultant class shock and class conflict on both sides, but this happened in only a tiny minority of cases. In those days more than eighty per cent of the population were categorised as working class, and the overwhelming majority of evacuees were billeted with working-class families. In fact I never heard of one who was not.
My arrival in Market Harborough was nothing like as exciting as the one I have described at second hand. I went with my father, who had made arrangements in advance. London’s rail terminus for Market Harborough, St Pancras, was only two tube stops from Hoxton, and I remember the steep stairway up to it from the tube exit; then the station building itself, grander than any I had seen (it was built as a luxury hotel). Train journeys took much longer then than now, and it made their destinations seem farther away, especially to children. It seemed to me that we were in the tr
ain for most of the day, stopping at town after town that I had never heard of. I began to think of Market Harborough as being an immense distance from London, beyond all those other worlds that lay between. This assumption stayed with me all the time I was there. Yet in fact it is under a hundred miles from London. The fastest of today’s trains manages the journey in an hour.
Perhaps a word about distances and communications might help set the scene. In 1940 all but a small minority of people in Britain had neither a car nor a telephone, so neither the personal mobility nor the instant communication that are now taken for granted existed. People travelled outside their own locality mostly by train, and the whole country was criss-crossed with branch lines served by trains that stopped at every little local station and halt. Journeys often involved changing trains twice, or even three times – and each change could involve a long wait. These journeys were exceedingly cumbersome by today’s standards – even one without changing that can now be accomplished in an hour could easily then have taken three, if not more; and wartime conditions made matters worse. The cost, too, was a barrier. Most people were poor by today’s standards, which made a train journey something for a special occasion, unless it was done for work. Because of all this, most people moved very little outside the areas in which they lived – only a minority even went on holiday. The only ready form of communication with absent friends was the post, so people in general wrote a lot more letters than they do now. However, few had been to school beyond the age of fourteen, so not all that many were good letter-writers. What all this added up to was that travel and communications were slow, laborious and expensive, and people had far, far less of them in their lives than they do today. They lived in more self-contained communities; and because of all these barriers, the distances between them were felt to be greater. If you had a particularly close friend or relation in another part of the country, an occasional letter would pass between you, and perhaps a visit once every few years, but neither they nor you would expect much more. If someone you knew emigrated to America or Australia you took it for granted that you would see them either never again or not more than once. In Scotland, as the ship moved off, the friends and relations assembled on the quayside would raise their voices hauntingly in the song ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ If their loved ones emigrated to New Zealand, a letter would take several weeks to reach them – so even a direct exchange by return of post would take some months. Since all these possibilities were improvements on what had gone before, the whole framework of assumption and expectation accepted it in a way that is hard for people to understand nowadays, when children grow up talking on the telephone from infancy, and go on to master e-mail and texting; when most families have cars, and there are long-distance bus services, and super-fast trains, and cheap air travel. During the Second World War in Market Harborough, literally years would go by without most of the evacuees being visited more than once by anyone from London, or receiving more than an occasional letter; and there was no question of talking on the telephone. For many, London had become impossibly far away. Market Harborough was now where their lives were. Many of them remained there when the war ended. Some are still there.