by Bryan Magee
Market Harborough is a compact town surrounded by rich farmland. In the nineteenth century it was described as ‘perhaps the best headquarters in the world for fox-hunting’. But it owes its existence, its location and its character to the fact that it is halfway between Northampton and Leicester. These two county towns are two days’ ride apart, which meant that in the Middle Ages there was need for an overnight stopping place somewhere near the mid-point. In the twelfth century Market Harborough was deliberately founded to meet this need – it can be thought of as the medieval equivalent of a New Town – and was planned from the beginning to be a market town. The open space in the centre was vast, for the market; but over the generations some of the market booths became permanent, and were then replaced by buildings, so there are floating islands of architecture in what is now the High Street. One of these is a fourteenth-century church with no churchyard, thought to have one of the most beautiful steeples in Britain. Beside it is a tiny grammar school dating from Shakespeare’s time. The school was built on stilts to function as an umbrella in wet weather for the butter market underneath. So distinctive is this building, and so picturesque, that it has become the logo of the town. During the stagecoach era the High Street was lined along both sides with coaching inns; some are still there, others have left a legacy of coaching yards which are entered under open archways. In the town’s history, travel and trade were always the determining factors. After the stagecoaches came the canal, then the railway; but because the town had been a planned one from the beginning, it remained concentrated on its old centre, which has remained pretty much as it was in pictures made in earlier centuries – and is essentially the same now as it was when I first set eyes on it over sixty-five years ago. It was as different from Worth as it was from Hoxton, and I realised as soon as I saw it that I had entered another world.
My father and I went first to the billeting office in the Town Square, where I was registered, and then to the house where I was to live. We walked up Northampton Road until the house numbers were into the hundreds before we came to a terraced house, smaller than its neighbour, with a minute front garden. Waiting for us was a Mrs Burgess, a small, bony woman in her late twenties, quite good-looking though also hard-looking. She put me in mind of my mother, though unlike my mother she obviously liked my father, as most women seemed to do. Cups of tea were drunk, and I was handed over.
Through the window of the front room where we had been sitting I watched my father’s back as he walked up the path alone to the front gate. I was struck by what a beautiful overcoat he was wearing.
The following morning Mrs Burgess showed me how to get to the Baptist church in Coventry Road, where my school was. After that I was on the loose in Market Harborough. Provided I showed up when a meal had been prepared, and came in at night by the appointed hour, Mrs Burgess and her husband showed no concern about where I was or what I was doing. I was back with the indifference I was used to. And after my experiences with my grandmother in Worth, it was welcome.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MARKET HARBOROUGH WAS such a little town – I doubt whether in those days it was much bigger than Hoxton – that we London kids treated the whole place as our manor. We overran it and made free with it, the more so as we had little means of venturing beyond it. None of us had bicycles, or money for buses, so we got to know few of the surrounding villages. In the town we played in the streets because that was what we had always done – whereas the local children went out into the fields, or played in the parks, which were (to us) surprisingly ample and close. We played in people’s gardens too, helping ourselves to their flowers and whatever we felt like taking from the trees. There were, I have since read, some two thousand London evacuees in a town of just over ten thousand people. For the resident population it must have been an unwelcome culture shock, almost a traumatic experience, but no such thought occurred to me at the time. The truth is – I am ashamed to say this – that we Londoners ever-so-slightly despised the locals, even though they were kind to us. As we saw it, we were from the only place that counted, the big city, London, and they were country bumpkins – well meaning, of course, and nice, but yokels. The grown-ups seemed to us slow-moving and slow-thinking, the children absurdly non-violent, innocent, gullible. Compared with us, I expect all this was true: almost every one of us, having grown up on the streets of Hoxton, was something of an Artful Dodger – always keen-eyed for the main chance, unscrupulous, dishonest, quick to use violence if we thought it would serve our ends and we would get away with it. We lied all the time as a matter of course. To the trusting, peaceable children of Market Harborough we must have seemed horrendous. They stood no chance against us, and we took away from them whatever of their possessions we wanted. During my year and a half there, there was very little friendly mixing between us – they played in their groups and we played in ours – though I gather that this changed as the war went on, as one might expect. We evacuees were an impossible handful for some of the families on whom we were billeted. Many reacted by making no attempt to control us beyond insisting on the basics of mealtimes and bedtime. Their ultimate sanction, which they resorted to frequently (it was happening all the time), was to report to the billeting officer that they were no longer willing to have us.
At school I loved being back in the playground atmosphere I had known in London, with ‘release’ still the favourite game. The girls had now been mixed in with the boys, but I was used to that from Three Bridges, and anyway the sexes played their games separately. The children in my class were new to me: my last pre-war term in London had been spent in the top class of the boys’ school, so when that term ended the other boys had departed from the school altogether. What had been Class Two moved up to become Class One, and these were now my companions – boys I had known by sight in the playground, but otherwise did not know. They were a year or two older than me, but I made good friends among them. Some of their personalities have remained alive in my mind ever since: John King, Alan McGouhan, Bert Grant, Ronnie Gentle, Eric Proud (hardly necessary to say that there was a running joke about Proud and Gentle). The school’s two leading lights and brightest sparks, Frank Hawkes and Cyril Mortimer, were too grown-up and sure of themselves to be aware of someone two years younger; but my researches for this book had the surprising consequence of putting me in touch with them again, because they stayed on after the war and made their lives in Market Harborough. (They helped me in checking my memories not only of wartime Market Harborough but also of pre-war Hoxton.)
The Edmund Halley school had been reduced in transition. The youngest children had been hived off and put in another school. Some families had not let their children, especially the girls, leave London at all, or had brought them home for the first Christmas of the war, because there was no bombing, and then kept them there. Others had tried to keep siblings together by evacuating them all to some other place, usually following the oldest, or with the mother accompanying. Two of the six assistant masters at my school had been called up, and two had gone elsewhere, so only two were left, though we still had the same headmaster. The two masters were Mr Hickford and Mr Fink, who had taught Classes Two and Three in Hoxton, and the headmaster was Mr Ogle. There was a nice Miss Engel from the girls’ school, who had taught my sister. These four made up the staff for a school of nearly a hundred nine-to-eleven-year-olds which consisted of two mixed classes, each of forty-something children. As usual in those days, the woman took the younger children. My class, Class One, was with Mr Hickford. I had been through its syllabus twice already, but that had been with a different lot of classmates and a different teacher – and there had been a time gap since – so I did not mind going through it again. In any case there was no alternative; and I quite liked Mr Hickford. It was to be a problem, though, after I had been through it a third time, what to do with me next.
The first winter of the Second World War was an unusually harsh one; in fact it was said then to be the coldest in living memory. The canal in Mar
ket Harborough froze so solid that the entire town turned out one Sunday and walked along it. This was the idea of the local newspaper, and a good one. From the top of Logan Street to the Wharf there was a mass of people walking in both directions as if the ice were a street. It amazed me to see everybody promenading like this. There were constantly people slithering and falling down, while others whizzed past on skates. Whenever since then I have seen a picture like this in a Dutch painting – and there seem to be a lot of them – I have thought of Market Harborough. I was surprised at how rough and multicoloured the ice was, though of course I know now that it must have been treated to make it safer. I had expected it to be like glass, completely clear and impossibly slippery. Something about the way the bulrushes on both banks stood out of the ice appealed to me especially, and has remained a powerful image. The weather was still freezing, and our feet became as cold as the ice. But it was immense fun.
That winter, going to and from school every day, there would be snowball fights, and groups of boys building snowmen. All this was new to me. In Hoxton, snow never stayed on the ground. In those London streets, full of pea-soup fog, teeming with humanity, such snow as had fallen during the winters of the late 1930s had turned to black or dark grey slush immediately. Only from comics and Christmas cards did I know about things like white snow, snowball fights and snowmen. Now they were real, and happening all round me, and I loved them. One evening when Joey, the other boy who lived with the Burgesses, came in through the back door covered from head to foot with compacted snow (a gang had captured him and rolled him in a snow bank), I thought he looked wonderful. The next day, just before getting home from school, I did a lot of solo rolling in a snow bank to effect a similar entrance, and was deflated by how much less responsive the audience was.
Most of the boys, including me, wore balaclava helmets and woolly scarves, so we looked very different from our usual selves. There were some who knocked together home-made sleds out of wooden boxes, and dragged them along the ice-covered pavements on lengths of string, or took them to nearby slopes for tobogganing, which then developed into races. Ponds and lakes froze, fish died. We were living in a transformed landscape, dazzling white, exhilarating.
That was the winter of the so-called Winter War, Russia’s invasion of Finland, which impinged on me to a surprising extent. In his secret pact with Hitler, Stalin had been promised Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as half of Poland, and in accordance with this he was to take possession of the three Baltic states the following June. But now, meanwhile, he tried to annexe Finland. The blind courage of the resistance he met with astonished the world, coming as it did from so small a country against so powerful an invader. The Finns inflicted great losses on the Russians, driving them into retreat in some places, even pursuing them back over their own frontier at one point. Phrases like ‘plucky little Finland’ were used all the time, and given an ironic edge by the fact that no other country was doing anything to help them. The British public followed the war with the attitude of football spectators. Stalin being Hitler’s ally, we naturally thought of the Finns as being on the same side as ourselves; and because our war with Hitler was quiescent, the Finns’ war against Stalin became our front-page news. The local paper had offices only a few doors away from the school, so I passed and re-passed its display windows every day; and although the Finnish war was not reported in its pages, its windows contained an ever-changing display of news photographs from Finland. These all-white pictures of snow-covered scenes drove home powerfully the subarctic conditions of the war. I followed them with as much fascination as I would have followed a serial in a comic, though with the difference that I knew they were real. It was the first time I interested myself in a public news event unprompted by my father.
I had not yet begun to look at newspapers on my own initiative, but people often pointed things out to me in them, and I would then read with interest. However, there was another way my reading habits developed while I was with the Burgesses. Mrs Burgess used to read magazines that looked to me like a version of my comics but aimed at grown-up women. In exactly the same way, these magazines of hers were printed on newspaper, in a smallish tabloid format, with line illustrations; each issue cost a penny or tuppence, and consisted of instalments of half a dozen serials. Her penny one was called Silver Star, her tuppenny one Golden Star; and there were copies of both lying around the house. I had always regarded love stories as soppy, and resented the apparently obligatory intrusion of a love interest into otherwise decent films, even cowboy films. But now, when I picked up Mrs Burgess’s magazines and started reading the stories, I found myself not just interested but suffused with a peculiar melting feeling. Nothing in my comics had caused me to feel like that. It was the feeling I had had in Three Bridges when I looked at Morag Macdonald. Once I discovered it again here it became a fix that I wanted to repeat; and so I became addicted to reading Mrs Burgess’s magazines. The serials were more samey than those in my comics. Each was always a love story, and the man was always a higher-up sort of person than the woman – either she was a nurse and he was a doctor, or she was a secretary and he was her boss, or she was a servant in a big house and he was a son of the family. Only the backgrounds differed, but they were nearly always places of work, and that too made the stories grown-up. Work was the grown-up world. Places of work never figured in my comics.
When Mrs Burgess found I was reading her magazines she was put out, and told me they were not for young boys. When I asked why not, she was unable to think of a reason. So she asked her husband. He reacted in the same way: he began by telling me that it was quite wrong for a boy of my age to read these things, but when I asked him what harm they would do he was unable to think of any. These exchanges left the Burgesses not knowing what to say, and the result was that the matter was left dangling in the air – which in practice meant that I continued reading the magazines.
Contrary to what the Burgesses must have supposed, when I read those stories there was no thought of sex in my mind. In fact, in those days no sex entered the stories either. Although it may be obvious now that I was experiencing the first stirrings of sexual feeling, it was not apparent to me at the time. I enjoyed wallowing in the lovely feelings my reading gave me in the same way as I enjoyed wallowing in the bath: it was a pleasure in itself, and therefore an end in itself. I was distantly aware of not understanding why I felt as I did, and perhaps of being mildly perplexed by it, but any such awareness was peripheral. By and large, the feelings themselves were enough for me. I identified with the young men in the drawings, always tall and slim, clean-shaven and open-faced, noticeably well dressed. They were decent, well-meaning chaps, and yet always misunderstood, even by the girl herself. They always loved the girl, if only coming round to it at the end; but until that point something always stood between them. For me all this was light years from identifying with figures like cowboys, gangsters, pirates, airmen and explorers, as I had done before. These new chaps were everyday people, not exotic, and certainly not superheroes; yet somehow I relished the thought of being in their shoes.
It was during this period that I went to adult films alone for the first time. Market Harborough had two cinemas, a fleapit on the road to the station called the Oriental, and a bright, modern one, the Ritz, that had just been built in the road I lived in. Both were open only in the evenings, when they showed the main film twice; and both put on two programmes a week. Before the days of television it was common for whole families to go together to the cinema a couple of times a week, and I went as often as the censorship rules would let children of my age go in by themselves. I preferred the Ritz, because at the Oriental the manager walked down the centre aisle halfway through the programme spraying the audience with disinfectant: I did not like that, although it did not stop me going there. I saw a lot of films, and now that I was going on my own they made a greater impact on me. One called Poison Pen, in which Flora Robson played a woman in a village who wrote anonymous letters, and ended
up hanging herself, gave me nightmares. (It was the first time I had heard of anonymous letters, and this is one of those associations that have recurred ever since.) The opening sequences of Wuthering Heights frightened me so much that I had to leave the cinema and miss the rest of the film. These films cut so deep that if I find myself watching one of them now on television, more than sixty-five years later, and not having seen it since or even thought about it, I realise that I remember parts of the dialogue and some of the screen pictures. The memory often takes the form of knowing what words are going to be spoken next, and sometimes I check this by saying the words aloud before the character utters them. I am seldom wrong, and when I am, it is usually because something else that I have forgotten happens before the words are spoken: they always come soon. A lot of these films are not even especially good ones. Those I liked best were adventure stories on an epic scale, historical for preference, like Drums Along the Mohawk. The bigness of the stories gave me a sense of satisfaction that was also big: I felt satiated after them, as if I had just had a wonderful dinner. There were a couple of films with Ronald Reagan, and I was so intrigued by the formation of his upper lip that the next day I stopped on my way to school to examine it in the still photographs outside the cinema. From then on I knew who he was, and was less shocked than surprised when he became President of the United States.